An Anxious Inheritance

An Anxious Inheritance
Religious Others and the Shaping of Sunnī
Orthodoxy

A A R O N W. H U G H E S
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– author.
Title: An anxious inheritance : religious others and the shaping of Sunnī
orthodoxy / Aaron W. Hughes.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021038638 (print) | LCCN 2021038639 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197613474 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197613498 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Religious tolerance—Islam. | Islam—Relations.
Classification: LCC BP171.5 .H84 2022 (print) | LCC BP171.5 (ebook) |
DDC 297.2/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038638
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038639

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

PA RT I L AT E A N T IQU E FA N TA SI E S
1. Qur ānic Others 19
2. Producing Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 43
3. Past Perfect: Opening the Jāhiliyya’s Complex Present 68

PA RT I I SU B SE QU E N T C O N S T RU C T IO N S
4. Good Jew, Bad Jew 93
5. Making Christians 117
6. Shī a: The Other Within 142
7. The Amorphous Zindīq 165

Conclusions 186

Abbreviations 191
Notes 193
Bibliography 235
Index 259
 Acknowledgments

This book has been several years in the making. Along the way it has picked
up a number of interlocutors, both institutional and personal, and both in-
tentional and unintentional. Parts were delivered orally in both the United
Kingdom and Europe, and I would like to thank a number of friends and
colleagues for invitations and the hospitality and wonderful conversations
that ensued. Before I list them in alphabetical order, I would also like to
acknowledge Air Canada’s Maple Leaf Lounges, which provide oases of
calm and tranquility (functioning as makeshift offices) in otherwise cha-
otic airports. My appreciation goes to Adi Bharat, Farhad Daftary, Majid
Daneshgar, Alon Dar, Wendy Dossett, Sami Everett, Wolfgang Fuchs, Robert
Gleave, Martin Goodman, Edmund Hayes, Alex Henley, Daniel Herskowitz,
Reza Huseini, Carool Kersten, István Kristó-Nagy, Bruce Lawrence, Russell
McCutcheon, Lauren Morrey, Jonas Otterbeck, Johanna Pink, Daryoush
Mohammad Poor, Steven Ramey, Sajjad Rizvi, Alexander Samely, Marco
Schöller, Matt Sheedy, Petra Sijpesteijn, Nicolai Sinai, Leif Stenberg,
Tommaso Tesei, Alana Vincent, Elliot Wolfson, Philip Wood, and Christian
Zahner. I am sure there are others whom I have forgotten, for which I am
apologetic. Needless to say, all problems and shortcomings of the present
work are solely my own responsibility. I would also like to single out Daniel
Boyarin and Susannah Heschel both for encouraging me to write this book,
which ended up being somewhat different than initially intended, and for the
support they have given me over the years.
The majority of the work was undertaken at three of my favorite libraries
in two of my favorite cities (albeit for radically different reasons): Oxford’s
Weston Library (though to me it will always be the “New Bod”) and Oriental
Institute Library, and the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. I am
grateful to the librarians at these institutions for both their expertise and
helpfulness. Financially this project was supported by a fellowship awarded
by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which the dean’s of-
fice at the University of Rochester graciously supplemented by giving me the
2019/2020 academic year off with no teaching or administrative responsibili-
ties. A fellowship from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and
viii Acknowledgments

the Oriental Institute at the same institution provided me with the time and
space to finish the project. The COVID pandemic put rather a wrench in that
year, but I and the project nevertheless persevered.
I would also like to thank my editor at Oxford University Press. Cynthia
Read, a consummate professional, has always believed in and been recep-
tive to my projects. The two anonymous readers for the press provided me
with very helpful comments, and this is a better work for their constructive
interventions. Finally, I must acknowledge two special ladies in my life—my
mum, Sadie Hughes, and my life partner, Liliana Leopardi, for their con-
tinual companionship and conversation.
 Introduction

The rise of Islam has to be related to developments in the world of

late antiquity.1

[There is] scope for an imaginative reconstitution and reconcilia-

tion of the structural properties of symbolic systems and the effec-
tiveness of symbols to bind individuals and groups to moral rules of
conduct. Cultures and social systems are, after all, not only thought,
but also lived.2

The Qur ān is a text that is relentlessly self-conscious of the fact that it exists
in a world occupied by entrenched and rival religions. We see this, for ex-
ample, in its constant acknowledgment that it constellates between Judaism
and Christianity. Taken as a whole, most of its verses that refer to these other
religions are frequently ambiguous. They offer words of acknowledgment
and praise on the one hand, yet are often highly disparaging on the other. The
following study suggests that such ambiguity was a direct result of the anx-
iety that religious others produced at a formative moment in Islam’s emer-
gence. Though my main focus will be on the early period, it is worth noting
that such anxiety was not unique to it but continued to power the theolog-
ical articulation of Islam in subsequent centuries. These Jews, Christians, and
others are rarely real individuals or groups, however; rather, they often func-
tion as textual foils that can be conveniently orchestrated and ultimately con-
trolled to facilitate self-definition. Employed as a series of tropes or as a set of
literary devices, these religious others are used in numerous ways and for all
sorts of purposes, many of them contradictory to one another.
If we situate Islam as a continuation of the late antique period, a practice
that is becoming increasingly common,3 this means that its early framers
inherited a social world that had been largely defined by previous empires
in the region (i.e., Roman, Byzantine, Sasanian). Of especial significance was

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0001
2 Introduction

The Theodosian Code, commissioned by the emperor Theodosius and com-

piled between 429 and 438, which represented a compilation of all the laws
of the Roman Empire under Christian emperors since 312.4 Among other
things, this Code successfully created a society wherein communal divisions
based on religion were the predominant means of identifying individ-
uals and their loyalties.5 This is particularly clear in its sixteenth and final
book, dealing specifically with the matter of religion. Therein, we witness
the increased political necessity of defining and establishing one orthodoxy
at the expense of what could now, at least through back-projection, be de-
fined as a variety of heterodoxies and heresies. In so doing, the Code fur-
ther reinforces the notion that orthodoxy and heterodoxy are intimately
connected in the religious imagination.6 They feed off of one another, with
each requiring the perceived negative traits of the other for its existence and
sustenance. The definition of one is necessarily contingent upon the defini-
tion and subsequent elucidation of the other.
Since Islam entered a world that was in large part defined by the Code’s
desire to create communal divisions based on religion, it, perhaps not sur-
prisingly, took religion for granted as imagining social differences between
communities.7 As the conquering armies made their way into places like
Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, everywhere Muslims—very much a minority at this
point8—looked they would have encountered the spiritual and physical
traces of these other religions.9 As a new religion lacking such an ancient
pedigree, inevitable questions arose: What were those responsible for artic-
ulating Islam to do with these other religious traditions? How, for example,
could older religions be situated within a much broader narrative landscape
that naturally culminated in Islam’s rise and florescence? The interpretive
acts used to address Islam’s relationship to these other religious traditions
were necessarily fraught with tensions as a set of deep-rooted connections
between the old and the new needed to be mined and ascertained with the
aim of using the former to make sense of the latter. While the early framers of
Islam (e.g., qur ānic redactors, adīth collectors, early legists, doxographers,
mutakallimūn [rational theologians], and popular preachers, among
others)10 could tap into these previous narratives, whether positively or neg-
atively, the last thing they could do was ignore them since religious others
were, especially in the early period, quite literally everywhere.11
One of the central leitmotifs weaving its way throughout late antiquity
is the manner in which various social groups creatively used the past, both
their own and that of others. For example, Eusebius of Caesarea referred to
 Introduction 3

Constantine as the new Moses, a role that conveniently combined the latter’s
Christian bona fides with his role as emperor of Rome.12 It was the Christian
past, in other words, that provided Constantine with the legitimacy to extend
Roman might and power beyond anything that previous pagan emperors had
imagined. He did this, moreover, by incorporating bishops into the tradi-
tional Roman governing elite, thereby displacing the traditional polytheistic
hierarchy. This use of select topoi associated with the Roman past combined
with a reworking of a monotheistic heritage in the service of rapid political
transformation is certainly not unique to Rome’s imperial aspirations. Rather,
the imagining of a set of cultural continuities around which the histories of
social groups—one’s own and those of one’s rivals—could be constructed,
understood, and ultimately elaborated functioned as an intricate part of the
late antique world to which Islam was heir. It was ultimately a powerful be-
lief in one God, as Garth Fowden has argued, that functioned as the glue to
bind and strengthen empires throughout this region from the third century
onward, a temporal period and geographic spread that certainly included
Islam’s rise.13
The use and creative deployment of others’ pasts in the service of com-
munal self-definition, however, had the potential to produce disconnec-
tion from those pasts and ultimately one’s claim to them. This was especially
the case since others, one’s political or religious rivals, might very well have
possessed or been perceived to possess better claims. Not infrequently this
resulted in the production of various or alternative “histories” and the cre-
ation of mythopoeia both of oneself and of others with the ultimate aim of
ascertaining the former’s divine legitimacy and the latter’s political depriva-
tion. The desire to create an imperial orthodoxy frequently created a set of
internal tensions. Most important in this regard was that between what was
slowly emerging as orthodoxy and the need to clarify it over and above that
which could inevitably be deemed heretical. This is another way of saying that
external others inevitably produced internal others, and vice versa, since both
often flourished in the same environment. Framed as a set of questions: How,
for example, to shape selectively the past or the pasts of others in a way that
included some but that simultaneously excluded others? What counted as a
valid or legitimate recasting? And, just as importantly, what was the nature of
the relationship between religious heresy and other religions?
The present study is about these tensions as they manifested themselves in
early Islam. More specifically, it is about how the early framers of that tradi-
tion struggled with religious others, both external and internal, and how this
4 Introduction

struggle was ultimately responsible for the creation of what would emerge as
Sunnī orthodoxy. While the latter would appear as the natural outgrowth of
Muhammad’s preaching to those doing the framing, it was ultimately little
more than a subsequent development accompanied by a retroactive projec-
tion onto the earliest period. Non-Muslims (among them Christians, Jews,
and Zoroastrians) and the “wrong” kinds of Muslims (e.g., Shī a) became in-
tegral—by virtue of their perceived stubbornness, infidelity, heresy, or the
like—to understand what true religion was not and, just as importantly,
what it should be. Without such religious others proper belief could not be
articulated and orthodoxy would simply have remained adrift in its own
inchoateness.
Such groups, or even individuals, were rarely real, however. They were
instead literary ghosts or even the ghosts of ghosts. They may have been
called “Jews” or “Christians” in name, but they rarely resembled real flesh-
and-blood historical Jewish or Christian actors. Instead, they became a se-
ries of imagined tropes and other fictions to define what proper Islam was or
ought to become. They were often encapsulated in personifications, taking
the form, for instance, of the “good” Jew (e.g., Ka b al-A bār) or the “good”
Christian (e.g., Ba īra) or alternatively the “bad” Jew (e.g., Abdallāh Ibn
Saba ) or the “bad” Christian (e.g., Paul).14 All subsequent thinking about
these religions as personified in such individuals ultimately stemmed from
the initial literary creations found within the Qur ān and expanded upon in
early Arabic literary traditions. These inky shadows occupied a penumbral
darkness within a textual universe, onto which the desires of the majority
could be projected, fantasized, and ultimately controlled.
What was it about such literary creations, expanded and otherwise
metonymized to the level of generalized sociological characteristics,
that appealed to Muslim thinkers? In this study, I argue that the self-per-
ceived newness of Islam in the earliest centuries, including the necessity of
establishing its doctrinal and theological intent, compounded with Muslim
encounters with ancient and now rival religious competitors, inevitably and
inexorably created a set of tensions and anxieties. Islam had to be imagined,
but such an activity could only be done in counterpoint with the conception
of rival religions, which had to be shown to be wrong at certain stages in
their own doctrinal development. Islam, perhaps more than other religions,
tended to be thought about and constructed comparatively from its very be-
ginning. The early framers of Islam needed to denigrate other religions, or at
least give them alternative histories than the ones they told themselves, while
 Introduction 5

simultaneously defining Islam as either their obverse or what they were sup-
posed to be but had failed to become on account of perfidy and tampering
(ta rīf). The subsequent articulation of orthodoxy was thus continuously
contingent upon working out the differences with these other religions.

Qur ānic Scripts

The others discussed here were, and indeed continue to be, mediated through
the qur ānic text, which functions as the base narrative for all subsequent un-
derstanding of others. Jews, Christians, and/or others that were subsequently
encountered throughout Islamic history ultimately ended up being filtered
through the initial interactions that Muhammad and the earliest commu-
nity were believed to have had with them in Mecca and Medina. I use the
term “believed” because we have very little historical evidence of what actu-
ally happened on account of the paucity of the Qur ān’s often highly stylized
accounts, not to mention the thorny question of the text’s final redaction.15
Indeed, the vagueness of the qur ānic narrative also meant that all religious
others had to be back-projected onto the Qur ān. This dialectic of projection
and retrojection, I suggest, succeeded in further contributing to the ways in
which Muslims thought, and indeed continue to think, about others and,
in the process, themselves. The community would come to encounter more
modern or at least more discrete individuals and groups, to be sure, yet such
individuals and groups would often have to be understood by reducing them
to the script that the Qur ān had already laid out for them. These religious
others were scaled down to qur ānic actors and it could be difficult to escape
the textual fates that Muslim scripture had sealed for them. It was the initial
encounter, or what was at least imagined to be the initial encounter, that ul-
timately made others comprehensible to Muslims, and that also produced
a certain inevitability in their interactions. Even as Islam was worked out
theologically, doctrinally, and legally, the tensions witnessed in the earliest
sources continued into later ones.
While real flesh-and-blood others may well be encountered, then, they
were ultimately understood based on earlier literary fictions, wherein they
were often portrayed in staccato tones. This approach of dealing with reli-
gious others took the rich complexities and competing histories of the many
social groups that Muslims encountered, both synchronically and diachron-
ically, and flattened them into a set of stereotypes. Stereotypes, we would do
6 Introduction

well to remember, operate through an intricate system of adjectives that em-

phasize certain chosen characteristics (while marginalizing others) as if they
were eternal truths. Such groups, returning to the normative Sunnī presenta-
tion, are accordingly “hypocritical,” “idolatrous,” “sinful,” and/or “lost.” Such
adjectives, with sufficient repetition, risk becoming mistaken for essential
traits, ones that are immune from both history and disinterested scrutiny but
that inevitably end up being imagined as historical.16 The categories that flow
from such language simultaneously manufactured knowledge of others and,
at the exact same time, helped to create actively Islam. In order to be lived
with, to invoke the quotation by Tambiah that opens this chapter, others first
needed to be thought.

Method

My overwhelming interest in what follows is on Islam’s earliest period

(roughly the first three centuries AH). This, however, does not preclude
going out to later sources either to follow particular trajectories or to show
consistency through time. Such an approach has the advantage of revealing
to just what an extent the anxieties encountered and produced in and by this
earliest period continued to manifest themselves in subsequent periods, al-
beit in constantly and ever-shifting ways. Indeed, one of my overarching
concerns here is to show how the anxieties in the earliest period have never
disappeared and, if anything, have contributed to how subsequent Muslim
thinkers continued to engage—though certainly with transformations—
other religions.
This study takes a broad view of the way in which Islam—and subsequently,
Islamic orthodoxy—was constructed through its portrayal of other religions.
These portrayals, I argue, were neither accurate nor historical but the nec-
essary byproduct of defining what Islam was and, even more importantly,
what it was not. These others functioned, to repeat, as literary characters,
stereotypes, exaggerated portrayals, and/or textual tropes necessary to carve
out the space—textual and ontological—for the new community’s articula-
tion. Such religious others became textual denizens who were as anxiety pro-
ducing as they were necessary. We witness this as early as and perhaps most
profoundly in the Qur ān, where a palpable tension emerges between non-
Muslims as bearers of a proto-Islam on the one hand, and non-Muslims as
corrupters of pre-Muhammadan Islam on the other. This forced subsequent
 Introduction 7

Muslim authors to construct pasts for these other religions in ways that they
could make sense of them and to understand why, even after the advent of
Islam, they would remain as non-Muslims.
Since this is a synthetic work, it builds upon the careful and often meticu-
lous research of others. Whereas many have tended to focus more narrowly
on a particular text or set of texts, methodologically my scope is much wider.
My interest is less in providing detailed and lengthy analyses of the primary
sources discussed in the pages that follow and more in showing how they fit
into the larger themes of anxiety and religious competition. Many of these
texts, especially in the first part, are well known and have been accordingly
well studied. I rely on the findings of others and, where necessary, agree, chal-
lenge, or otherwise find fault with their conclusions. In so doing my goal here
is to bring together scholarship from a variety of genres and fields—such as
Islamic studies, late antique studies, critical religious studies, and literary
studies—that are unfortunately rarely in conversation with one another.
Though I subtitle this work, in part, as “the making of Sunnī orthodoxy,”
it should be readily apparent that there is no value judgment implicit in the
locution.17 I neither agree nor disagree with such statement. I have no inten-
tion of implying that this is the only “orthodoxy” in Islam or that there are no
other forms of orthodoxies. Supporting such a position, we might point to
the fact that a belief in normativity, while certainly finding favor with today’s
Sunnī majority, has been contested over the centuries—one only has to note,
for example, how Shī ism functioned as the official creed of the Fatimids and
the Buyids. Within this context, it might also be worth noting, if it is not al-
ready apparent, that orthodoxy in the earliest period is not necessarily the
same as it is in the later period. Indeed, orthodoxy, not unlike its opposite,
heterodoxy, constantly shifts and morphs in response to various ideological
stimuli and configurations. My point here is to show just what an artificially
constructed and politically motivated category it is. Rather than chart the
history of orthodoxy/heresy in early Islam, I seek to show how such ortho-
doxy could only come into existence through encounters—both real and
imagined, historical and textual—with other religious traditions, and that
the earliest Islamic literary tradition functioned as a script through which
subsequent interactions were mediated and ultimately understood. Despite
the name in the subtitle, then, this is not meant to be a work of Sunnī Islam,
nor is it informed by a Sunnī-centric methodology, despite the fact that the
overwhelming majority of the sources I examine are Sunnī. Instead, I subject
these sources to an analysis that shows them to emerge out of specific social,
8 Introduction

political, and ideological contexts as opposed to offering either a reflection or

presentation of the natural order of things.
Here it might be worth recalling that many interreligious disputes, tied
in with intrareligious positioning, have often conveniently labeled and
mischaracterized the religious beliefs and practices of others. As John
B. Henderson argued several decades ago, there exists a set of common
strategies used to distinguish orthodox “truth” from heretical “errors” that
we witness across numerous religious traditions.18 A large part of this stems
from the need to mischaracterize other religions. Buddhists thinkers, for ex-
ample, have no problem misrepresenting Advaita Vedanta, just as thinkers
associated with the latter tradition certainly mischaracterize Buddhist
views with the aim of articulating their own first principles; the same, of
course, could be said for Catholics and Protestants, and Christians and Jews.
While we should not expect Islamic views of the other to be more neutral or
objective, and while we should also be aware that religious polemic almost
always strategically distorts the other, given the multireligious and multi-
ethnic milieu of late antiquity in which Islam originated, the intensity with
which Muslim thinkers went about this task was non pareil. Islam consist-
ently thought about others to think about itself—and, of course, vice versa.

External Others

At the heart of this book resides, for lack of a better term, a fundamental
ambiguity with other religious traditions and their scriptures. While pains-
takingly clear to the early framers of Islam that their tradition was in conver-
sation with previous monotheisms, it was equally clear that the new needed
to be differentiated from the old. The latter had to be made to attest to the
former. This enabled early Muslims to show how all previous species of un-
belief differed significantly from what was actively being constructed as
proper Muslim belief. My interest is in the textual strategies that made this
possible. The concern here, in other words, is not in interfaith relations be-
tween Muslims and other groups. Rather, it is in how Muslims textualized
such relations given the aforementioned tensions and ambiguities. This is a
study, then, in representation and misrepresentation, and not about histor-
ical relations between Islam and its religious minorities.
One of the main ways that Islamic thinkers dealt with religious others was
to argue that, at the moments of their revelation, these other religions were
 Introduction 9

essentially Islam and in possession of their own versions of the Qur ān. At
their moments of historical rupture, in other words, these other religious
communities—and again, I want to emphasize that Islam entered a world
that thought about groups as discrete religions in possession of their own
scriptures—were, for all intents and purposes, Islam or at the very least the
“Islams” of their days. Over time, according to the normative Muslim narra-
tive, these other religions became so corrupted by human desire and ideology
that they forfeited connections to divine truth, all but rendering themselves
useless.
This narrative is ultimately what permitted Islam to have a relationship to
the pasts of other religions without becoming simply defined by or reduced
to those pasts. Yet, and this is important to emphasize, this was neither
simply nor solely a theological concern, nor was it a matter of who had what
first and how they went astray. Indeed, as I hope to show in greater detail
in chapter 5, as Muslim armies conquered new territories, they encountered
not just narratives and monuments associated with earlier and now rival
monotheisms but also a set of legal and political infrastructures that they
subsequently inherited and transformed into their own. This inheritance
further contributed to the anxiety I have mentioned. Muslims now found
themselves in positions of power and authority over non-Muslims, some-
thing that could be easily justified theologically. However, they now had to
administer that power and authority, and one of the main ways they did this
was to use the pre-existent legal and political structures of others. Muslim
authorities now had to think about and categorize these religions, and those
who ascribed to them, and one of the main ways they did this was to employ
a set of frameworks that they inherited from these others.

Internal Others

Religious others did not just belong to different religions, however. In this re-
spect, I also focus on minoritarian traditions within Islam. The most obvious
candidate for this, of course, is the Shī a, especially what would become the
Twelver tradition. Differing from what would become the dominant Sunnī
tradition in terms of its location of authority and all the concomitant features
that arose on account of it, the Shī a gradually developed their own distinct
and distinctive traditions. It is important, however, to avoid issues of ortho-
doxy/heterodoxy and normativity/non-normativity in the earliest period.
10 Introduction

The former term in each of these two binaries could only be understood by
means of articulating their opposites, and this is something that took consid-
erable time to achieve.
Using the Twelver Shī a as my guide for a discussion of internal others,
I focus on how they functioned as yet another foil for the articulation of or-
thodoxy. Often ascribed characteristics of other religions (e.g., the “Shī a are
the Jews of our umma”), they add an additional dimension to my analysis as
they serve the important role of the proximate other. As orthodoxy devel-
oped in Islam, it located itself between proximate others on the one hand,
and erstwhile ones on the other. This had the combined effect of showing
both where other religious traditions went astray and, just as importantly,
where Muslims could also potentially go astray if they did not follow the path
that orthodoxy laid out for them. That normative Sunnism considered the
Shī a to be based on a Jewish heresy at the heart of Islam only fueled further
this notion, and again shows the inevitable, if complex, dialectic between “or-
thodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” in addition to that between internal and external
others. The strategies used to construct otherness—no matter the group—
were, for all intents and purposes, the same.

A Note on Sources

The earliest period of Islam—dating from roughly the birth of Muhammad

to the early Abbāsid period—is among the most difficult to document. The
paucity of eyewitness accounts and the existence of many later partisan
sources that claim to be coterminous with the events in question make this
period highly contentious.19 My goal in this study is not to wade into or be
sidetracked by these complex debates about the reliability of the early Islamic
tradition.20 To create a positive argument, I maintain that some, but by no
means all, of the events of early Islamic history can be gleaned from these
later sources. While this is not tantamount to a wholescale rejection of the
more skeptical approach, one that I have found (and often continue to find)
useful and indeed one that I have employed in the past, that position has the
potential to offer readings that are so disparate from the sources—including
the way that Muslims read them—as to be unhelpful for a constructive pro-
ject like the one I am engaged in here.21 Ultimately, we all must use the same
sources, and this means that we can only do so much with them. We can
read them “against the grain” or we can accept them gullibly, but it strikes
 Introduction 11

me that the truth of the matter must reside somewhere in the middle. This
means accepting their basic structure and contents while having a critical set
of questions that are aware of the problems, pitfalls, and indeed promises of
using these sources.
It is perhaps worth noting within this context that the skeptical approach
to the Qur ān and other early Islamic literature—which focuses on their au-
thorship, dating, and redaction—have failed to replace the broad contours of
the traditional narrative supplied by the admittedly later Islamic sources.22
Even a radically skeptical approach, for example, that denies the historicity of
Muhammad and the dating and locale of the recension of the qur ānic narra-
tive, for example, is often forced to fall back on a position that resembles the
narrative as laid out by the Islamic tradition.
While I certainly acknowledge the problems, contradictions, and
distortions supplied by these sources, the only other option is to criticize
them as unreliable and of later provenance and then attempt a radically dif-
ferent reconstruction based on a combination of non-Islamic sources and
thought experimentation.23 The skeptical approach to early Islamic history
asks us, in the words of Donner, “to accept on faith—since there is no sur-
viving evidence—that the true origins of Islam are different than what is
portrayed by Islamic traditions—perhaps radically different.”24 Indeed, as
Shahab Ahmed has argued, even if the later community may have rejected
or otherwise changed the tenor of certain ideas from the earliest period, they
nonetheless maintained the basic framework of such ideas found in their on-
going desire to create what would eventually emerge as orthodoxy.25
As has been the case for centuries, then, the dense and multifaceted thicket
of early Arabic literature’s versions of history continues to confound the
search for tidy answers. Rather than take this as an excuse to make more and
more inventive models, I prefer to use this historical and textual confusion as
a reflection of the actual social confusion that would have existed in the ear-
liest period. And rather than use such confusion as a green light to posit the
existence of any number of inhabitants on the Arabian Peninsula at the time
of Muhammad, I contend that there was probably much more admixture of
ideas and uncertainty than is traditionally assumed. Following the lead of
Jack Tannous, we might conjecture that this admixture was the direct result
of the fact that most early Muslims, like the Christians they met and who
converted to the new religion, probably knew a great deal less about their
religions than our dominant narratives give them credit for.26 What emerged
as orthodoxy by the late ninth and early tenth centuries was not the Islam
12 Introduction

that the majority of people converted to, and it was precisely this latter Islam
that orthodoxy eventually tried to respond to, correct, or otherwise provide
an alternative.27

Between Religious Studies and Islamic Studies

This study, like all of my work, emerges from religious studies, a field in which
I was trained and wherein I am gainfully and thankfully employed. Because it
tends to be a generalist field, one interested in matters of theory and method
increasingly (and unfortunately) at the expense of language work, it tends
to eschew technical studies of texts in the manner that, say, Arabic literature
or Islamic studies does. This tension between the particular and universal
itself creates a sense of confusion. At what point is a study too technical, of
interest to only a few other specialists, or when does it become too general
and unrecognizable to fellow specialists outside of religious studies? Within
this context, the greatest task for those of us who work in religious studies is
to translate between the highly technical specifics of our chosen subfield, in
this case Islamic studies, and the often too general framework provided by
our disciplinary home.
I trust that my interest in the construction of “orthodoxy” based on showing
the retroactively projected errors of others should be of relevance to those
working in and across numerous traditions and idioms. The framers of all
religions, whatsoever we choose to call them (e.g., legists, jurists, ideologues,
propagandists), deem it necessary to create epistemological and ontological
space for the new by casting it in familiar terms while simultaneously showing
how that which came before went astray or was just plain wrong.
Though religious studies, broadly speaking, tends to privilege the inter-
faith, this study is, as I have already remarked, not interested in dialogue be-
tween religions. I have no intention, in other words, in showing how Islam
interacted with its minorities;28 nor am I interested in Sunnī-Shī ī relations.
My focus, to reiterate, is on the need and necessity of textual misrepresenta-
tion. Religious traditions, from the local to the generic, need religious others
to power self-definition. This not infrequently involves caricature, stereo-
types, and misrepresentation for orthodox presentation. The goal of the
scholar is not to correct such matters, but to show where, how, when, and
why such portrayals emerge.
 Introduction 13

Breakdown of Chapters

What follows is divided into three parts. The first part—consisting of three
chapters—examines the qur ānic and other early Islamic literary terms used
to imagine and conceptualize religious others, especially those who are not
categorized or typologized as muslimūn. The second part—composed of
four chapters—then examines how these terms and categories were used as
Muslims expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula and began to encounter,
and subsequently engage, real and more discrete religious others. To do so,
they recycled, with some modification, many of those terms and catego-
ries discussed in the first part. A breakdown of the individual chapters is as
follows.
Chapter 1 examines the problems associated with our earliest sources
(e.g., the Qur ān, adīth, and Sīra literature). Rather than maintain that
these sources provide eyewitness or historical accounts, I argue that they in-
stead provide a set of malleable literary motifs that helped later generations
make sense of the ambiguities associated with the earliest period. This led
to the creation of a set of indigenous categories—munāfiqūn (“hypocrites”),
mushrikūn (“idolators”), muslimūn (“Muslims”), and mu minūn
(“believers”)—that facilitated the imposition of order on what was undoubt-
edly a very messy social situation. Such terms provided the categories into
which could be placed the various social groups that those who followed the
fledging Muhammadan message—only later to become the Islamic tradi-
tion—encountered. Fluid, imprecise, and ambiguous, such categories nev-
ertheless created a map upon which self and others could be conveniently
plotted and subsequently located.
The second chapter explores how the early community expanded upon
the aforementioned categories as it began to encounter real flesh-and-blood
religious others entrenched in areas outside of the Arabian Peninsula. Even
through such encounters were historical, the presentation of religious others
remained literary. As Islam spread into these regions with ancient and deep-
rooted monotheistic traditions, Muslim thinkers had to make sense of such
traditions in a manner that, while acknowledging their antiquity, neverthe-
less discredited their presents. At issue was how to demonstrate just when,
why, and where they went wrong. Ancient traditions associated with Judaism,
Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, among others, needed to be plotted on a
“historical” grid.
14 Introduction

The ambiguities and anxieties associated with these encounters meant that
the earliest years of Islam had to be systematically rethought. A not insignif-
icant body of literature— adīths, the Biography (Sīra) of Muhammad, and
even historical reflections—now became the main arenas for these imagina-
tive acts. These literary genres effectively took the discrete religious and so-
cial communities encountered by their authors and projected them back to fit
onto the period prior to and at the time of Muhammad and the early umma.
Such retrojection further permitted the framers of Islam to make sense of,
and further articulate, Muhammad’s message in new ways. Activities such
as this, which imagined discrete traditions at a time when they seemed to be
anything but on the Arabian Peninsula, meant that the creation of a Muslim
identity defined in counterpoint with other religious identities existed from
the beginning.
Chapter 3 examines the concept of jāhiliyya, the so-called Age of Ignorance
prior to Muhammad’s prophetic call. It shows how this term—as artificial
and imprecise as others discussed in previous chapters—also functioned as a
vague and ambiguous category under which could be subsumed any number
of different and competing characteristics. All of these terms had the further
advantage of bringing orthodoxy into focus and, once in focus, aid in the
sharpening of its ideological edge. Again, though, it was a later projection,
one that was as much about clarifying the present as it was about elucidating
a distant past.
If the previous chapters, making up part I of the study, seek to show how
later thinkers understood a messy past, the chapters of part II shift to “real”
and specific communities. I put “real” in quotation marks to indicate that
these accounts are often anything but real and are instead, once again, imag-
ined projections of what later Muslim thinkers would have liked Jews or
Christians to have been. These religious others, now more specific than those
encountered previously, nevertheless continue to function as foils for the
construction of correct belief and practice. In this regard, Islam and Muslim
thinkers continued to need categories and ideas developed in the Qur ān to
think about alterity.
Chapter 4 examines how such rubrics—in this case, “Jew” and “Judaism”—
functioned as one such category into which social and religious others could
be placed. Yet, in order for Jews, whether real or imagined, to be understood,
they continued to be mediated through the narrative provided by the qur ānic
text. This created a situation wherein real Jews were encountered in specific
places and times, but the only way that they could be processed was through
 Introduction 15

the categories that imagined them as crafty and deceitful, two adjectives that
had been ascribed to them in the Qur ān, and which continued to exist in
later literature.
In the fifth chapter we again encounter this tension between non-
Muslims as bearers of a proto-Islam and non-Muslims as corrupters of pre-
Muhammadan Islam. Once again, the Qur ān provided an initial framework
to undertake this; however, it was amplified in subsequent literature. Rather
than employ the same strategy as the previous chapter, however, this one in-
stead pursues a different line of inquiry. It shows how the early Muslim en-
counter with Christian texts and institutions created a related, and by now
familiar, set of anxieties. To create a system of governance, taxation, and so
forth, the new empire had to use many of the structures already in place.
Again, the necessity of differentiating Islam, the new and regnant religion,
from that which it overtook was essential.
Chapter 6 switches focus somewhat and examines the Shī a, the internal
other par excellence for mainstream Sunnism. Once again, we witness a se-
ries of tensions as real-life groups had to be reduced to arbitrary paradigms.
If “the Jew” functioned as the quintessential other without, “the Shī ī” neces-
sarily becomes the other within. Both subsequently take up their respective
places as the disembodied denizens of heresiographical lists and other texts
that function as the catalyst for the establishment of so-called correct belief.
Shī ī and Jew thus both become inextricably linked in their marginalization,
even though such marginalization is paradoxically responsible for the very
articulation of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, in other words, demands heterodoxy
for its own clarification. Indeed, the former could not exist without the latter,
and vice versa. In medieval Islam, heresiography functioned as the primary
vehicle for Sunnī theologians to define who they were and what they believed
by using what they imagined to be the incorrect beliefs of those who rejected
them. It is no coincidence that the Shī a were frequently given the name al-
Rāfi a (literally “the rejectors”) in this literature.
If the previous chapters of part II dealt with real, if highly essentialized and
textualized, religious others, the seventh chapter focuses on a term no less
ambiguous than those found in part I. The zindīq (pl. zanādiqa) was a cat-
egory used to refer to those individuals, and rarely communities, who were
believed to be nominally Muslim but who subscribed to what were increas-
ingly becoming nonorthodox practices or beliefs. It was a catch-all phrase
that could be used to describe everything from Manicheans to libertines,
and from court secretaries to one’s theological opponents. Like the others
16 Introduction

discussed in this study, they further aided in the construction of what would
become Islamic orthodoxy by providing a representation of what heresy (as
opposed to just heterodoxy) and nonbelief looked like. Unlike those religious
others (ahl al-kitāb) who were tolerated, zindīqs in the early Abbāsid period
were sought out, tried for their “crime,” and even executed. Indeed, the ca-
liph al-Mahdī (r. 158/775–169/785) went so far as to set up an “inquisition”
(mi na) responsible for weeding them out. This chapter argues, among other
things, that such a political act was heavily invested in further establishing
religious orthodoxy at a formative moment in Islam’s development.

* * *
The plurality of ummāt (“peoples”) in the qur ānic world is often imagined as
the direct result of stubbornness and human dissent from God’s true religion,
of which all other ummāt originally partook. Such communities present the
Qur ān—like the early Muslim community more generally—with a series of
conundrums. Jews and Christians, and occasionally others, sometimes ap-
pear as communities similar to that of the Muslims. At other times, however,
they appear as but the latest iterations of communities to whom prophetic
warnings had been given and ultimately ignored, not unlike those extinct
ancient civilizations that inhabited an important place in Arabian lore.
At times, the sin of the non-Muslim communities puts them on the same
level as idolaters (mushrikūn); yet at other times such communities must be
presented as the harbingers to Muhammad’s prophetic message.
These differing positions, I submit, all emerge from the same place: anx-
iety and the need to differentiate the new community from those that came
before. As Islam spread and moved into areas in which ancient monotheisms
existed and wherein Muslims were at least initially a minority, this anxiety
continued unabated and Muslim thinkers continued to use the doctrines
and practices of these other monotheisms as a way to further articulate what
they considered to be Islam’s theological and salvific superiority. This pre-
occupation with other religions—or perhaps better the imagining of what
these other religions were—facilitated the creation of orthodoxy in Islam.
The study that follows seeks to provide a window onto the process whereby
Muslim identity in the early Muslim period was fluid and that, through con-
tact with a host of religious others, became powerfully sustained.
 PART I
L AT E ANT IQUE FA N TASI E S
 1
Qur ānic Others

The Jews and Christians belong to the Community of Muhammad.1

This [i.e., the above] is an extremely filthy idea that should not be
discussed.2

The earliest years of Islam, the period corresponding roughly to the decades
associated with Muhammad’s later years and those immediately following
his death (d. 11/632), are among the most difficult to document. This, as
mentioned in the introduction, is the direct result of a paucity of sources on
the one hand, and later sources that masquerade as eyewitness accounts of
the period in question on the other. It is the problematic nature of these latter
sources, especially their desire to back-project their own concerns onto the
earliest period, that is my focus in the present chapter. The need on the part
of later generations to provide themselves with a genealogy aided in the con-
struction, elaboration, and subsequent dissemination of a set of indigenous
categories to make sense of an otherwise chaotic and unruly social situation.
Such categories could then be used to sift through and situate the various
groups that those associated with the fledging Muhammadan message—only
later to become defined as the Islamic tradition—encountered or, alterna-
tively, were imagined to encounter. Framed somewhat differently, these cate-
gories provided a convenient landscape upon which to locate various others
using a set of recognizable, if largely stereotypical, characteristics.
Despite the claim that Muhammad’s religious message was the same
one preached by the patriarch Abraham (Ibrāhīm), everywhere the earliest
Muslims looked they would have encountered other monotheisms and indi-
viduals who practiced them. These religions would have been in possession
of ancient pedigrees with rich traditions that would have, in many instances,
taken place within the great material edifices associated with the ancient
Near East.3 Even those who would later be classified as polytheists and idol

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0002
20 Late Antique Fantasies

worshippers were in possession of such traditions.4 The anxieties on the part

of early Muslims to understand the novelty of their new message while simul-
taneously attempting to reconcile it with those of others, the present chapter
argues, helped to create a discourse of religious alterity. Here we might in-
voke the adage that, to quote Jonathan Z. Smith, “a ‘theory of the other’ is but
another way of phrasing a ‘theory of the self.’ ”5
We must also not lose sight of the fact that, as the conquests proceeded
beyond the Arabian Peninsula, all of the earliest Muslims were either
converts or descendants of converts from these other and increasingly rival
monotheisms.6 Since converts imply a conversion from another religious tra-
dition, it is clear that, from its inception, Islam was in intimate and daily con-
tact with other religions, and Muslims with those who subscribed to them or
formerly subscribed to them. Muslim encounters with non-Muslims would
thus have represented one of the earliest sets of tensions facing the fledgling
community.7 Perhaps on account of this, it should come as no surprise that
we do not possess a unanimous body of literature that speaks with one voice
on the matter of religious others, something that I tried to signal with the two
competing quotations that open this chapter.
One of the clearest textual openings onto this ambiguity is the Qur ān it-
self. Therein we witness religious others praised, as they must be since they
ultimately represent precursors that legitimate the new religion; yet with al-
most the same or even greater frequency, they are roundly condemned on
account of their intransigence. Implicit in both forms, praise and blame, is
the quest for differentiation and the concomitant need for Muslim self-defi-
nition. To use but one example, let me focus briefly on “the Jews.” In Q 32/23,
for example, we read, “and we gave Moses the Book [al-kitāb], so do not be
in doubt over his meeting. And we made it the guidance for the Children of
Israel.” Yet, in Q 4/46, we read, “Among the Jews are those who distort words
from their [proper] usages and say, ‘We hear and disobey.’ . . . [T]hey twist
their tongues and defame the religion [ a nan fī al-dīn]. If they had said in-
stead that ‘we hear and obey’ and ‘wait for us [to understand],’ it would have
been better for them and more suitable. But Allah has cursed them for their
disbelief [la anuhum Allāh bi-kufrihim], so they believe not, except for a few.”
These “few” individuals, as we shall see in chapters 4 and 5 later, prove nec-
essary because they function as the conduits to the past and, as such, provide
the needed recognition of the new religion’s truth.
The gradual emergence of Muhammad’s message—with its generic themes
of monotheism, the Day of Judgment, and the importance of Scripture—would
 Qur ānic Others 21

certainly have been recognizable to other monotheists in the area.8 However,

such themes would have paled in comparison to the stories with ancient
patinas that Jews and Christians possessed. A not insignificant expenditure of
intellectual energy involved the creation of a metaphorical map upon which
religious others could be placed, evaluated, and ultimately presented as that
which was not Islam. If the new needed to be connected to the old, the former
had to be imagined as the finest vehicle of expression of earlier ideas. The im-
portance of the Arabic language became essential to this process. The Qur ān
(Q 26/195), for example, explicitly refers to itself as revealed “in a pure Arabic
language” (bi-lisān arabī mubīn), a theme that would be subsequently vec-
tored and elaborated as the doctrine of i jāz al-qur ān (“the inimitability of the
Qur ān”).9 The creation of a distinct ethno-linguistic community enabled the
earliest framers of Islam to locate themselves and, most importantly, their dis-
tinctiveness from other monotheists in the area.10
Yet, an inevitable question emerged: Why be a Muslim when one could os-
tensibly just become a Jew or a Christian presumably among other Jews and
Christians who also spoke Arabic on the Arabian Peninsula? Since Islamic
law and ritual, two features that would become paramount for subsequent
Muslim self-definition, did not yet exist, Muhammad’s monotheism could
very easily have been folded into other legal or ritualistic systems.11 This is
why the Qur ān spends so much time trying to carve out space for a new
type of religious believer, the muslim, someone defined by their faith (īmān)
and who was distinct from other monotheists on the one hand, and var-
ious species of polytheism and idolatry on the other.12 The religion of this
new believer, Islam, needed to be familiar enough with earlier monotheistic
traditions, with the latter providing it with a genealogy, all the while simulta-
neously showing how the new message was different by means of, what are to
us, a set of familiar supersessionist arguments.13
Where there is too much similarity, difference must be staked out and
marked. In this, the conceptual world of the Qur ān and early Islam reflects
late antique presumptions about religion.14 The late Thomas Sizgorich, for ex-
ample, has shown how a number of distinctive features of early Islamic piety
and community building had important late antique Christian precedents.15
He stressed, for example, similarities between sectarian entrepreneurs like
John Chrysostom (d. 407) and, moving slightly ahead for the moment,
A mad ibn anbal (d. 241/855), both of whom sought to erect firm com-
munal boundaries between religious communities that shared a basic reli-
gious narrative and that coexisted within larger empires.16 More recently,
22 Late Antique Fantasies

Philip Wood has argued that the qur ānic presumption of a social world di-
vided into communities of different “peoples of the book” surrounded by
an undifferentiated mass of unbelievers or heretics finds resonances in legal
traditions associated with the Roman imperial tradition.17 Such a categori-
zation, he suggests, gave the Qur ān’s adherents a precocious sense of their
own difference and superiority. As Islam spread into the Fertile Crescent, he
maintains, early Muslim rulers developed systems of governing and ways
of describing non-Muslims that bore many resemblances to earlier legal
treatment of Jews—as a legally recognized yet non-normative tradition—
by Christians.18 The caliphate, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, thus
inherited a paradigm of religion that judged others according to Islamic
presumptions of what a religion should be.
My goal in the present chapter is to show how Muslims, from the very ear-
liest period, sought to categorize and taxonomize religious others. This was
not necessarily an ad hoc process, however; indeed, as we have just seen, there
were several options provided by late antique precedent. To define Islam—
what it was, what it was not—other religious communities had to be located
and their beliefs imagined and articulated; whether correctly or incorrectly is
here beside the point. While the descriptions of other religions may well have
been more polemical than real, the intent was the same: to create Islam using
the categories supplied by these others, and by transforming Islam into either
their opposites or their perfections.
While an earlier generation of Orientalist scholars was intent on showing
what Islam borrowed, recycled, or otherwise passively received from these other
religions, this chapter eschews such an approach as both unhelpful and politi-
cally motivated.19 I instead prefer to join those scholars who, conscious of over-
lapping identities in general and in late antiquity in particular, stress the complex
interactions of mutually inclusive social forms.20 As believers, simple and other-
wise, joined the new movement, they brought new ideas with them that would
inevitably have aided in the construction of what would become Islamic.

Donner’s “Community of Believers”

Before proceeding, it might be worth commenting briefly on the “commu-

nity of believers” as understood by Fred Donner in his Muhammad and the
Believers. According to him, Islam began as a “religious movement” that
would have folded, at least initially, into its midst members from a variety of
 Qur ānic Others 23

other religious traditions on the Arabian Peninsula.21 While trying to differ-

entiate “religion” from other terms such as “culture” or the “political” in the
seventh century carries its own set of problems,22 it is certainly understand-
able why Donner would want to claim Islam’s undeniable religious inflection
in light of the traditional Orientalist and Islamophobic critiques that want to
reduce the emergence of Islam to a set of political forces.
Donner also seeks to switch the conversation from those who have
maintained that Islam was largely an economic and social movement23 or
even a nationalist and political movement.24 Instead of imagining the early
leaders of the Umayyad and Abbāsid caliphates manipulating religion for
political gain, Donner argues that Islam began as an ecumenical movement
of “believers” (al-mu minūn). These believers recognized the oneness of God;
they were concerned with the “rampant sinfulness of the world around them
and wished to live by a higher standard in their own behavior”; and because
they were “convinced that the world around them was mired in sin and cor-
ruption, they felt an urgent need to ensure their own salvation by living in
strict accordance with the revealed law, as the judgment could dawn at any
moment.”25 Only gradually, Donner maintains, was this group of mu minūn
transformed into muslimūn at a later stage of Islam’s theological and doc-
trinal development. Until this transformation happened, for him, this group
of believers was ecumenical—even “interfaith” to use a modern locution—
and, Donner argues, would have included “pious Christians and Jews.”26
Like many others, however, Donner does not really tell us much about either
the contours or contents of Christianity or Judaism at this time and in this
place—probably because we know very little about them.
Yet, Donner overlooks other qur ānic evidence that clearly separates the
new community from “nonbelievers,” “polytheists,” and “hypocrites,” all to
be discussed shortly. From its inception, as we shall see, the Muslim com-
munity was surrounded by others, and folding these others into a generic
set of mu minūn ignores all the terms that the Qur ān uses to divvy up its
social world. It also overlooks the need—from the earliest period—to show
similarities and differences with these others. We see this, for example, in
anecdotes supplied by the ninth-century author al-Jā i that describe how a
Muslim physician could not get work on account of the fact that his potential
Muslim patients preferred a Christian doctor to a Muslim one.27 Jews and
Christians presumably were thought to be better doctors on account of their
lengthy and ancient religious heritages. Such stories, while anecdotal, never-
theless reveal the level of anxiety that early Muslims felt.
24 Late Antique Fantasies

Creating Qur ānic Others

One of our earliest Muslim sources to document the interaction between

Muslims and non-Muslims is the Qur ān. Though early, it is worthwhile,
as Angelika Neuwirth reminds us, to differentiate between the transmitted
“anthological” form of the text, with its redacted 114 sūras that are largely or-
ganized by length from longest to shortest, and what she calls its “pre-form,”
to wit, “the oral proclamation that preceded the text’s codification.”28 It is
through the latter, in other words, that we are afforded glimpses into the for-
mation of Islam within what Wansbrough calls a highly “sectarian milieu.”29
Though I agree with him that a specifically Muslim identity did not emerge
until the late second/eighth century in an environment that included other
monotheistic traditions, I am less skeptical than him when it comes to the
reliability of these sources.30
This Qur ān, and here I am sympathetic to Neuwirth’s argument and
shall stay with it for just a little longer, should not be imagined simply as an
“Islamic” text, but rather as one that only makes sense when situated within
the context of “the debate culture of Late Antiquity.”31 The existence of this
oral Qur ān preserves some of the earliest accounts of how Muhammad and
the early Muslims imagined their community, specifically its differences from
other religious communities and the narratives/traditions of the latter that
they would have encountered on the Arabian Peninsula. Before proceeding,
however, we must make what should be an obvious point: The Qur ān reveals
a doctrinally underdefined Islam. Its Islam is not, in other words, the Islam of
the ninth or tenth centuries. The goal of the text is, to quote Sidney Griffith,
to create a “polemical rhetoric” that does not necessarily reflect real belief.32
The Qur ān thus creates and sustains an imaginary universe that develops a
set of autochthonous categories to place the others that the early community
encountered and that could, with slight modification, be used in the ensuing
centuries to continue to map them. We thus see in the Qur ān a real concern
with what others—particularly Jews and Christians—did or, perhaps better,
were perceived to do. This concern, as I have remarked several times already,
helped to provide space, both textual and existential, in which to situate the
new message.33
As Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina in pos-
session of a still inchoate and rather generic-sounding apocalyptic message,
they soon encountered practitioners of other monotheistic religions, espe-
cially Jews—though what kind of Jews is not at all clear.34 While eschewing
 Qur ānic Others 25

the disputative environment of the later medieval period, it is certain that

such encounters would have produced tensions and ambiguities and, in the
process, would have led to the gradual clarification of ideas—on the part of
both Muhammad and his followers and those of other monotheisms.35 Such
encounters undoubtedly sharpened the Muhammadan message,36 as it simul-
taneously forced the new community to look to pre-Islamic traditions, such as
cultic practices (e.g., the ka ba) and categories (e.g., the anīf, to be discussed in
greater detail later), as a way to ground its message in a newly articulated and
distinctive Arabian antiquity. Within this context, it is worth noting that Islam
and Arab identity, as Peter Webb has shown, developed isomorphically.37
This is another way of saying that as early Muslims met religious others,
they had to make sense of them in addition to making sense of themselves.38
Other monotheists, for instance, possessed their own scriptures with their
own unique traditions concerning the nature of creation, revelation, and
redemption. Yet rather than see the Qur ān simply as the receptacle of
such traditions, we ought to imagine it as a text that, while in conversation
with these earlier traditions, is relentlessly self-conscious of itself as abro-
gating them.39 The Qur ān, in other words, desires to connect its message to
the semantic field provided by those of previous ones, especially Jews and
Christians. We read, for example:

Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and
the Sabians40—whoever believes in God and the Last Day, and does right-
eousness—they have their reward with the Lord. [There will be] no fear on
them, nor will they feel sorrow.41

Here we encounter one of many attempts on the part of the early com-
munity to connect Muhammad’s message to the messages of pre-existent
monotheists in the area. Or, again, in Q 2/47–48 we further read:

Children of Israel [banū Isrā īl] remember My blessings that I bestowed

on you, and that I have favored you over the worlds [fa alutukum ala al-
alamīn]. Fear a Day when no soul will intercede for another at all, nor will
intercession be accepted from it, nor compensation taken from it, nor will
they be aided.

The Jews, here referred to as the banū Isrā īl (as opposed to the more pe-
jorative al-yahūd), are told to remember their blessing. In keeping with the
26 Late Antique Fantasies

larger qur ānic theme of forgetting and remembering, the Children of Israel
are reminded that they are the ones who have received, at least according to
Q 2/40, a covenant ( ahd) from God. Despite such assurances and this initial
positive assessment, the Qur ān is simultaneously compelled to show how
“the Jews” ultimately lost their divine promise on account of their intransi-
gence, a trope that should be familiar to any reader of the New Testament. We
see this, for example, in Q 2/83, where the reader is informed that the cove-
nant had been taken away from the banū Isrā īl on account of their worship
of other gods and their failure to maintain the structure of proper prayer and
almsgiving (zakāt).42
Central to the qur ānic message is the desire to see itself as but the latest
iteration of an ancient message, one that, in the hands of others, had become
corrupt through tampering (ta rīf). This is why the Qur ān frequently warns
the nascent community against becoming either Jews or Christians through
conversion, both of which would certainly have been realistic options for the
emergence of a new monotheistic message in late sixth-century Arabia. In Q
2/120, for example, we are told “neither the Jews nor the Christians will ever
be pleased with you until you follow their religion [wa-lan tar ā anka al-
yahūd wa lā al-nasārā hatā tattabi a millatahum].” This is echoed in 2/135–
137, where we read:

They say, “Be Jews or Christians and you will be (rightly) guided.” Say, “No!
the creed of Abraham the anīf. He was not one of the idolaters.” Say: “We
believe in God and what has been given to Moses and Jesus, and what was
given to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between
any of them, and to Him we submit [i.e., are muslimūn].” If they believe in
something like what you believe in, they have been (rightly) guided, but
if they turn away, they are only in defiance. God will be sufficient for you
against them. He is the Hearing, the Knowing.

While there is certainly an acknowledgment in passages such as the afore-

mentioned that there exist certain fundamental affinities between the new
and the old religions, its ultimate message is clear and undeniable: Those who
submit to God’s will, that is, those who are Muslims, function as a distinct
community—though, admittedly, an underdefined one at this point—that,
though familiar, cannot be reducible to previous monotheistic messages. In
this passage we also witness the claim that Abraham is not a Jew, but a anīf,
a “primordial monotheist,” namely, one of those pious monotheists who had
 Qur ānic Others 27

existed prior to the advent of Islam and who had refused to join another mon-
otheistic religion. This latter category granted an antiquity to the new mes-
sage of Islam just as it provided an important and necessary foreshadowing
of Muhammad, who was imagined to preach the same message as Abraham
and who was also constructed as a true believer existing among idolatrous
people.
If there was a compulsion to connect one’s new message to the old, how-
ever, it was also necessary to prepare the foundation for ultimate differentia-
tion. Therefore, existing side by side with such verses as the aforementioned,
we also witness a much sharper tone when it comes to non-Muslims. For
example:

You who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are
allies of one another. Whoever of you takes them as allies is already one of
them. Surely God does not guide the people who are evildoers.43

Here Jews and Christians are lumped together as allies (awliyā ) and put in
stark juxtaposition with the fledgling umma that is increasingly defined by
its proper belief. Christians and Jews form an alliance, in other words, that
threatens to undermine Muhammad’s message. While that message would
certainly be decades, if not centuries, from being articulated fully, it is evi-
dent even at the earliest stages that such a message only made sense within
the context of earlier monotheisms with which Muslims were slowly be-
coming familiar. We witness this, for example, in the following:

People of the Book! Our messenger has come to you, making clear to you
much of what you have been hiding in the Book, and overlooking much.
Now a light and a clear Book [kitāb mubīn] from God has come to you. By
means of it, God guides those who follow after His approval in the ways of
peace, and He brings them out of the darkness to the light, by His permis-
sion, and guides them to a straight path [ ira mustaqīm].44

Implicit in this passage is the idea—one that will subsequently be picked

up by the later Muslim theological tradition45—that other monothe-
istic communities have either removed or hidden key passages from their
scriptures.46 Jewish and Christian scriptures, not to mention those of others
(presumably like the Sabians), now become problematic and incorrect in
their beliefs, so much so that the followers of Muhammad have no need to
28 Late Antique Fantasies

read them or to consult with those who have. In Q 2/75–79, for example, we
once again see how previous religions are accused of changing that which
they have been given:

Are you eager that they should believe you, even though a group of them
has already heard the word of God and then altered it after they had under-
stood it [wa-qad kāna farīqun minhum yasma ūna kalāma llāhi thumma
yu arrifūnahū]—and they know [they have done this]. When they meet
those who believe, they say, “We believe,” but when some of them meet with
others, they say, “Do you report to them what God has disclosed to you, so
that they may dispute with you by means of it in the presence of your Lord?
Will you not understand?” Do they not know that God knows what they
keep secret and what they speak aloud. . . . So woe to those who write the
Book with their [own] hands, [and] then say, “This is from God,” in order to
sell it for a small price. Woe to them for what their hands have written, and
woe to them for what they own.47

This is the locus classicus for the charge that Jews and others tampered
with their scriptures.48 Implicit in this verse is that Jews (and subsequently
Christians) originally had the true message (to wit, Islam) but, for a variety
of reasons, changed it to fit their own personal circumstances. The Muslim
community is necessarily warned about following suit. Again, we see how
other religions help to make sense of the basic Islamic narrative, and at the
same time, there is a desire to distance the new from the old. In Q 2/221, we
read further:

Ask the Children of Israel how many a sign of evidence We have given
them. And whoever changes the favor of God after it has come to him then
indeed God is severe in penalty [wa man yubaddil ni mata-llāhi min ba di
mā jā athi fa-inna llāha shadīdu l- iqāb].

Into this situation of purported textual corruption and human mal-

feasance the Qur ān situates Muhammad. In Q 62/2, for example, he is
described in the following terms: God “has raised up from among the
common people a messenger [ba atha fī al-ummiyyīn rasūlan minhum]” to
“read His signs to them and purify them and teach them the book and the
wisdom, while they were clearly astray before this [yatlū alayhim āyātihi wa-
yuzakkīhim wa-yu allimuhum al-kitāb wa- l- ikma wa-in kānū min qablu fī
 Qur ānic Others 29

alālin mubīnin].”49 Muhammad, in other words, has a clear message, one

that, while familiar, is nonetheless intimately connected to the linguistic pu-
rity of the Arabs.50
We now begin to see the differentiation between Muhammad and his
followers on the one hand, and that of “Jews” (al-yahūd) and “Christians”
(al-na ārā) on the other. Terms such al-yahūd and al-na ārā function less as
specific referents to actual communities, I want to suggest, and more as con-
venient placeholders that can be expanded and contracted at will, to define
negatively what was imagined to be in opposition to that which was slowly
emerging as correct belief. We see this on display, for example, in sūra 4:

As for the evildoings of those who judaize [fa-bi- ulmin min al-dhīna
hādū], we have made good [certain] things forbidden to them which were
permitted to them [before]. And [for] their taking of usury while they had
been forbidden from it, and their consuming of the people’s wealth unjustly.
And we have prepared for the disbelievers among them a painful punish-
ment [wa- a tadnā li-l-kāfirīna minhum adhāban alīma]. But those firm
in knowledge among them—and the believers [al-mu minūn]—believe in
what has been revealed to you [i.e., Muhammad] and what was revealed be-
fore you. And the establishers of prayer and those who give alms [zakāt] and
the believers in God and the Last Day - those We will give a great reward.51

Implicit in this verse, to recycle a motif from the New Testament, is the
transference of divine favor from “those who Judaize” (al-dhīna hādū) to the
new community. Jews, presumably on account of their strict beliefs, actively
keep “many from the way of God” (wa-bi- addihim an sabīli llāhi kathīra).
The direct result of this, at least in the Qur ān’s conceptual universe, is that
God’s revelation to Moses has now been superseded by the message sent to
Muhammad. The remainder of the verses then recounts just how Jews and
Christians erred theologically. Christians err, for example, in their insistence
that Jesus was divine and not simply a messenger, and that God is but one
( innamā llāhu ilāhun wā idun), despite the fact that they ascribe to him
a trinity (wa-lā taqūlū thalātha—“and do not say three”).52 This is subse-
quently followed, almost immediately in the opening of the following sūra,
with a set of criticisms directed against Jewish disobedience and Christian
doctrine, including a set of dietary guidelines that the new community must
follow.53 Once again, we witness how Muslim practice is defined in the light
of the categories supplied by the practices of others.
30 Late Antique Fantasies

To conclude this section, there sits uncomfortably in the Qur ān at least

three distinct, yet overlapping, points of view when it comes to other and
pre-existent religions, especially those of other monotheisms. These more
than likely reflect three distinct stages in the young movement’s develop-
ment. The first stage is one of acceptance and is intimately connected to the
idea that Muhammad and his followers are part of a much larger “commu-
nity of believers,” to invoke Donner’s locution, but without fully endorsing
his larger argument.54 The second stage, reflected in other passages but
mainly of the Medinian variety, concerns the growing need to differentiate
the new message from that of the older ones. It is no longer enough, in other
words, to be like yahūd and na ārā because there was a genuine fear that
the new message might simply be co-opted into these earlier monotheisms.
This may well have coincided with the change of the qibla from Jerusalem
to Mecca, which, as a physical act of defiance, is symbolic of the unique-
ness of the new community’s existence.55 The final stage further explores
this differentiation and begins to morph into active polemics against these
other religions. Previous scriptures have been tampered with, for example,
or their communities have been consistently undermined by false believers.
Other monotheisms now become religions that pose an existential and on-
tological threat to the new community, so much so that they had to be ac-
tively resisted.

unafā and Mushrikūn: Establishing a

Set of Pre-Islamic Categories

Generic Jews and Christians, as we have just seen, are omnipresent in the
Qur ān as two real, if artificially constructed, communities, against which to
define what was slowly emerging as “correct” belief and practice.56 Since the
Qur ān is less interested in providing accurate let alone historical accounts
of the contours of these groups, we can only surmise what they believed and
how they worshipped.57 Within this context, it might be worth noting that
we also have very little idea of just what types of Judaism or Christianity
existed on the Arabian Peninsula at this period—and the Qur ān certainly
offers us no insights in this regard.58 Instead, the presence of textual Jews and
Christians primarily functions as a way for the young community to think
about itself: where it came from, what its message was, and, just as impor-
tantly, who was (and was not) part of the community.
 Qur ānic Others 31

To explore these themes a little more closely, it is worth examining a set

of Muslim categories—all constructed and applied in the Qur ān—that were
applicable to categorizing the fledgling movement that was beginning to
constellate around the message and personality of Muhammad. Since the
Qur ān, and especially the later Islamic literary tradition, presents him as
the vehicle of divine revelation, a category had to be developed to account
for him. Since he was surrounded by polytheists on the one hand and other
monotheists on the other, the later Islamic tradition was forced to walk a
very delicate line so as to situate him carefully between the two and in such
a manner that he would remain untainted by either. The subsequent Islamic
tradition, under which the Qur ān would certainly have been redacted and
understood, could not have the harbinger of Islam be a Jew, a Christian, or a
polytheist before beginning his revelatory mission.59 The charge of corrup-
tion on the part of previous religious forms would have necessarily made
Muhammad suspect.60 To avoid this, a special category was developed to
include those who had always been monotheists but who remained uncon-
taminated from pre-existent versions. Muhammad now became a anīf (pl.
unafā ), or “primordial monotheist.”61
But if Muhammad was imagined as a anīf, its opposite also needed to
exist, because only by defining the latter’s existence could a anīf be brought
into further relief. The creative dialectic between the anīf and his oppo-
site would facilitate the elaboration of Muhammad’s prophetic criteria and,
of course, those who believed in it. The Qur ān here thinks in binary terms.
Just as Islam can only be defined by that which is non-Islam, a believer by
an unbeliever, a anīf needed its opposite. In this context, the “polytheist”
(mushrik; pl. mushrikūn) became the antithesis of the “monotheist.”62 The
present section will accordingly examine this binary of autochthonous
Arabo-Islamic categories, while the subsequent one will focus on another,
that of the “believer” (mu min; pl. mu minūn) and the “hypocrite” (munāfiq;
pl. munāfiqūn). Both of these binaries, I wish to argue, aided the early Muslim
community in its quest for self-definition.
Since early Islamic literature was very conscious of not having Muhammad
subscribe to either Judaism or Christianity, the new category of anīf per-
mitted a way to think about his perfection.63 This term, it will be recalled
from the previous section, refers to one who follows what is believed to be
the original form of monotheism, and whose prototype is the patriarch
Abraham (Ibrāhīm), whom the Qur ān (3/67) informs us “was not a Jew, nor
a Christian, but he was a submitting anīf, and not among the polytheists
32 Late Antique Fantasies

[mā kāna ibrāhīm yahūdiyyan wa-lā na rāniyyan wa-lākin kāna anīf

muslim wa-mā kāna mina l-mushrikīn].”64 This verse is so important because
it establishes a deep-rooted connection between Muhammad and Abraham,
Muslims and Israelites, as practitioners of the originary monotheism. We
also witness how it connects anīf to its opposite, the mushrik.
In Q 98/5, we further read how all the “people of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb)
were initially commanded to be unafā , which the verse subsequently
describes as consisting of service to God, prayer, and the giving of alms, all of
which contribute to the performance of “the right religion” (al-dīn al-qayyim).
Only after people are given books and clear signs, however, the Qur ān informs
us that they become divided, presumably over what constitutes the correct in-
terpretation of such signs. The unafā , however, exist as pure monotheists
who inhabit the world without scriptures, and who represent a pristine com-
munity that knows neither division nor discord. As the new Muslim com-
munity was not yet in possession of a “book” in the sense that it would be
in subsequent generations, they became intimately connected to the unafā ,
functioning as a contemporary window onto the pure and ancient religion of
Abraham, Jesus, and all those others who had previously believed in God and
His judgment, but without engaging in sectarianism.
This category further contributed to the fledgling Muslim community’s
sense of itself by providing it with a monotheistic genealogy. Like the unafā
of old, they were monotheists engaged in prayer and almsgiving despite
the fact that they did not possess a book (that would come later).65 Unlike
other monotheisms that had forgotten their pristine origins and engaged in
sectarian strife, they represented a unity that other religions only knew in
their primordial pasts. This rearrangement of the past, as we shall see in con-
siderable detail in chapter 3, played a formative role in charting the young
community’s existence.
This past was, to be sure, an imagined one. There were no unafā , and the
term seems to have originated in the Qur ān, perhaps also having been in use
in the pre-Islamic period to describe those who appeared to be monotheists,
but of no particular provenance.66 The term enabled early Muslims to lo-
cate Muhammad as unblemished by previous monotheisms, as it simulta-
neously permitted them to construct for themselves a religious pedigree that
predated the existence of other monotheisms. Muslims were not descendants
of either Jews or Christians, but of the unafā . The category anīf/ unafā
thus allowed them to imagine themselves as believing in and practicing the
pure worship of God, which had been revealed in a similar pristine form to
 Qur ānic Others 33

other prophets but that had subsequently been tampered with or forgotten
by their followers.
The category became a placeholder, functioning as a type of code,
that enabled the framers of early Islam to locate Islam between the Scylla
of idolaters and the Charybdis of other monotheisms. It is perhaps worth
noting that in subsequent Islamic literature, the category anīf is used inter-
changeably with “Muslim.” The poet Abū Qays ibn Aslat, according to Ibn
Hishām, composed the following poem of thanksgiving:

Lord of Humankind, serious things have happened

The difficult and the simple are involved.
Lord of humankind, if we have erred
Guide us to the good path.
Were it not for our Lord we should be Jews
And the religion of the Jews is not convenient.
Were it not for our Lord we should be Christians
Along with the monks on Mount Jalīl.
But when we were created, we were created unafā ;
Our religion is from all the generations.67

The category, like so many of the ones examined here, has a fairly large
and wide-ranging semantic field. First, it provided the early Muslims with
a monotheistic pedigree by linking them to ancient biblical figures such as
Abraham; second, it permitted a framework to situate, and thus legitimate,
Muhammad’s prophetic call; third, it could show the early Muslim commu-
nity their own genealogy, familiar but different enough, to permit them to
define who and what they were not. As neither Jews nor Christians, the cat-
egory of anīf facilitated an important and necessary difference at a time of
potential social overlap.
The anīf is often associated, as seen in the poem earlier and as seen also in
the Qur ān (e.g., Q 30/30), with the innate disposition (fi ra) that all humans
possess but that only Muslims are able to actualize fully. It is that which has
the potential to bind the community together and that which concomitantly
differentiates them from all those who reject the Muhammadan message.
This enabled the early Muslims—and indeed later Muslims commenting
on this period68—to differentiate true belief from false. The latter could be
constructed either, as we shall see shortly, as polytheism or increasingly as
the wrong kind of monotheism (e.g., Judaism or Christianity).
34 Late Antique Fantasies

In this regard, many of these verses that denote either the unafā as a
group or Abraham as a specific anīf are often put in stark juxtaposition with
another term of qur ānic origin, mushrik (pl. mushrikūn), namely “idolater”
or “polytheist.”69 Derived from the noun shirk or “associating” something or
someone with God, it refers to those who have received revelation but who
have ignored it or otherwise tampered with it.70 The term occurs forty-two
times in the Qur ān, where, more often than not, it designates those who have
refused to heed the prophetic call, though, as Hawting duly notes, the term
could also be used to describe not actual idolators but other monotheists
who fell short of the beliefs and practices as developed in the Qur ān.71
Crone has perhaps done the most to ascertain the beliefs and practices of the
mushrikūn.72 My concern here, however, is less with actual polytheists (or
Jews or Christians, for that matter) than with their textual imaginary.
The mushrikūn are those who “associate” God with other things (e.g.,
idols, other humans). In Q 4/48, for example, shirk is defined as a “great sin”
( ithman a īman). And in Q 10/66, we read:

It is not a fact that to God [belongs] whomever is in the heavens and whom-
ever is on the earth? They follow—those who call on associates [shurakā a]
other than God—they only follow conjecture [al- ann] and they only guess.

Waardenburg defines ann as “subjective opinion” that is the opposite of

true belief ascertained through knowledge ( ilm) acquired through “experi-
ence and reason, revelation and reflection.”73 He also argues that the term has
social, and not just religious, resonances and refers to all those who would
have rejected the new message, thereby forming a quasi-community and the
opposite of the unafā and/or muslimūn. Mushrikūn, then, functions as a ru-
bric or a category that denotes all those pre-Islamic polytheists and increas-
ingly all those Jews, Christians, and others that refuse to submit to God’s will.
One can only have monotheism (taw id) with an understanding of poly-
theism (shirk).74 The mushrik, then, inverts the monotheism of the anīf. If
the latter symbolizes true faith in the midst of idolatry, the former represents
wrong belief and an impediment to true religious doctrine. Since every
Muslim is, by definition, a anīf, the mushrikūn are those who reject not just
the teaching of Muhammad, but also the ancient Arabian tradition of pure
monotheism that was now imagined to precede it.75 They can be polytheists,
namely those who worshipped pre-Islamic deities (e.g., Q 11/109; 15/94),
or they can be Christians who associate Jesus with God or indeed Jews who
 Qur ānic Others 35

were believed to have tricked them into such improper belief.76 It is, in other
words, a catch-all category. If the unafā represented a unified, pristine, and
originary monotheistic community, implicit in the mushrikūn is division:

Set your face to the religion as a anīf—the creation [fi ra] of God, for which
He created. [There is] no change in the creation of God. That is the right re-
ligion [al-dīn al-qayyim], though most people do not know, turning to Him
[in repentance]. Guard yourself against Him, and observe the prayer, and
do not be one of the mushrikūn, one of those who have divided up their
religion [farraq dīnahum], and become parties [shī a], each faction [ izb]
gloating over what was with them.77

Here we see, once again, how the categories mushrikūn and unafā are
put in counterpoint. The former impinges upon and threatens to undermine
the latter. Indeed, as Crone notes, “we only know the beliefs and practices of
the Messenger’s opponents from his own polemical statements about them,
and that this obviously poses the question how far we can infer what they
actually said or did from his account of them.”78 The mushrikūn, in other
words, are all but lost to us—if, in fact, they ever existed. All that remains are
their textual traces, which can serve any number of purposes. These traces
function less as accurate statements and more as polemical treatments. In
this, following Hawting, they would seem to be directed more at contem-
poraneous audiences than they were at actual polytheists.79 One could per-
haps say that one of the major leitmotifs that emerges from the Qur ān, at
least in early sūras, is the desire to transform mushrikūn into believers
by means of informing them of the error of their ways. This is done, ac-
cording to Waardenburg, by having Muhammad preach to them God’s clear
signs contained in nature and history—including his treatment of earlier
monotheisms—and revealing to them their fate on the Day of Judgment.80
Mushrikūn, not unlike unafā , functions as a placeholder into which can
be grouped any number of individuals and/or groups. While Christians are
often accused of “associating” Jesus with God, for example, the Qur ān is
quite clear to define other monotheists as “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb).
Yet, it seems quite clear that in some respects even monotheists—for ex-
ample, through their Christology or, in the case of the Jews, their tampering
with their scriptures—can be guilty of shirk.81 In general, however, the cat-
egory tends to be reserved for individuals and groups who are not “People
of the Book” but more run-of-the-mill pre-Islamic Arab idolaters. In the
36 Late Antique Fantasies

Qur ān shirk is described as the most unforgiveable offense, and the work fre-
quently makes fun of those who engage in the practice:

Surely those you call on instead of God are servants like you. So call on
them and let them respond to you, if you are truthful. Do they have feet
with which they walk, or do they have hands with which they grasp, or do
they have eyes with which they see, or do they have ears with which they
hear? Say, “Call on your associates [shurakā ] [and] then plot against me
and do not spare me. Surely my ally is God, who has sent down the Book.
He takes the righteous as allies. Those you call on instead of Him cannot
help you, nor can they [even] help themselves.” If you call them to guidance,
they do not hear, you see them looking at you, but they do not see.82

Here we see how the early Muslim community used the term mushrikūn
to show not only the incorrectness of those who engage in idol worship but
also their sheer ignorance. Unlike the God of monotheism, these idols prove
unhelpful to the task with which they are ostensibly charged. It is a term,
like the unafā , with a great deal of semantic valence. In the earliest sūras,
for example, mushrikūn would seem to refer to those who do not believe, or
who believe incorrectly, in the God of monotheism. In later sūras, however,
it primarily refers to those who were previously monotheists but had subse-
quently become “wrong doers” (fāsiqūn), as seen, for example, in Q 3/110.83

Mu minūn and Munāfiqūn: Post-Revelation

Categories of Belief

One of the major categories used in the Qur ān to designate the community
of the faithful was that of mu min (pl. mu minūn), or “believers.”84 According
to Johannes J. G. Janson, writing in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia
of Islam, the root itself, -m-n, would seem to derive from the provision of
safety and protection.85 Implicit in the noun, then, is that the community
provides a natural unit offering spiritual nourishment and security for all its
individuals. In this it can, and often does, function as a synonym for Muslims
(muslimūn) and indeed the umma more generally. It is also one of the names
of God: In Q 59/23, for example, he is described as al-mu min, or the one who
bestows security. Like other terms discussed in this chapter, however, it is a
term or category with a large semantic range. In some cases, for example, it
 Qur ānic Others 37

has a larger connotation than just “Muslims” and instead would seem to refer
to all those who believe in monotheism.86 The term, on Donner’s reading,
can then be expanded to include the Jews of Medina or, even more broadly, to
include other monotheists in the area, whereupon it becomes synonymous
with ahl al-kitāb, or “people of the book.” This fluidity, as we shall see in the
following chapter, also carries into the document known as “the Constitution
of Medina.”
In Q23, titled “al-mu minūn,” we learn about the spiritual and moral
virtues of “those who believe.” As with the term unafā , the positive virtues
of the believer only come into full relief when put in counterpoint with and
ultimately defined by their opposite. The inverse of al-mu minūn are “those
who disbelieve” (kāfirūn or kuffār; sg. kāfir) and, just as dangerously, those
“hypocrites” (munāfiqūn; sg. munāfiq) who pretend to believe outwardly but
secretly strive to undermine the divine message.87 Unlike the latter two cat-
egories, the inhabitants of which will face stern punishment in the hereafter,
the believers are promised success, both in this life and in the afterlife. This
sūra, which tradition dates to the Medinan period, opens with a definition of
the mu min:

Certainly, the believers have attained salvation [ afla a]—they are those
who are humble in the prayers [fī ālātihim], who avoid vain talk, who carry
out their duty of almsgiving [wa-lladhīna hum li-l-zakāti fā ilūn], and who
guard their private parts . . . and they are the ones who keep their trusts
and covenants [ amānātihum wa- ahdihum], and who are watchful of their
prayers. They will be the inheritors [al-wārithūn], those who will inherit
paradise [yarithūn al-firdawsa] and who will remain in it [forever].88

Based on such descriptions, we can see why Donner wants to transform

it into an ecumenical movement.89 However, I do not think that his argu-
ment makes enough room for the types of difference inherent to the qur ānic
descriptors discussed in the chapter. Indeed, later in Q 23, we are informed
that Noah brought the same message of belief in the one God to his people.
In other chapters, we read about the contents of the mu min’s belief ( īmān).
These include,90 as Q 4/136–137 informs us:

You who believe! Believe [ āminū] in God and His messenger, and the Book
He has sent down on His messenger, and the Book which He has sent down
before [this]. Whoever disbelieves [yakfur] in God and His angels, and
38 Late Antique Fantasies

His Books and His messengers, and the Last Day, has gone very far astray.
Surely those who have believed, then disbelieved, then believed [again],
then disbelieved [again], and then increased in disbelief—God will not for-
give them or guide them [to the] way.

This verse describes both the contents of proper belief and, by necessity, its
opposite. In the final third of this passage we are also introduced to those who
equivocate between belief and unbelief. These would seem to be the individ-
uals who possess the choice to move to the positive virtues of the believers or
toward the vices of those who refuse or are unable to believe. Again, it would
seem that the qur ānic message is in part—perhaps in large part—directed at
these equivocators, offering them a lifeline to join the fledgling community.
In the Qur ān, as we have just seen, the mu min is dialectically opposed to
two other types, the kāfir and the munāfiq. Allow me to take these up in turn.
If the mu min possesses belief, or īmān, the kāfir is defined by his or her
kufr, or disbelief.91 As “unbelievers,” the kuffār are those who reject that
which the believers accept: God, his messengers, their books, and their
warnings about the impending Day of Judgment (see Q 1/136). It seems
that the term—which is connected to being ungrateful—originally was em-
ployed in the Qur ān to refer to all those Meccans who refused to join the
fledgling community and who actively sought to persecute those who were
a part of it. As with the category mu minūn, there is an entire sūra, Q 109,
devoted to them. This chapter, which tradition dates to the Meccan period,
is short and, in essence, provides a generic description of how mu minūn
and kuffār engage in different types of worship.92 Initially, as we can see from
Q 109, the Qur ān encouraged a cautious attitude toward the kuffār, pre-
sumably hoping that they would eventually realize the error of their ways
and join the believers. In another Meccan sūra, Q 73, as a further example,
the believers are told to “be patient over what they say, and keep away from
them in a graceful manner [hajran jamīlan].”93 As time went on, however,
believers were cautioned to keep apart from them (e.g., Q 3/14) and, if nec-
essary, take the offensive. We witness this, for example, in the following
Medinan verse:

Fight [wa-qātilū] in the way of God those who fight you, but do not trans-
gress. Indeed God does not like transgressors [al-mu tadīn]. And kill them
wherever you confront them, and expell them from where they expelled
you for faithlessness [al-fitna] is graver than killing. Do not fight in the
 Qur ānic Others 39

Holy Mosque [al-masjid al- arām] unless they fight you therein; but if they
fight kill them. Such is the requital of the unbelievers [al-kāfirūn].94

Marilyn Waldman has argued convincingly that the term kāfir, like so many
technical terms in the Qur ān, “accumulates meaning over time.”95 We should
be aware, in other words, that these terms can adopt a rather large range of
meanings in different contexts. While a word’s morphology may well remain
constant over time, what it might be expanded or reduced to can certainly
change.
As the community developed, its use of terms and categories also de-
veloped. Such terms and categories could be used in any number of ways,
and to refer to any number of peoples/communities, as the situation
demanded. What is important for my argument, though, is that each pos-
itive term needed the existence of its opposite, and vice versa, to generate
meaning and ultimately definition. In terms of the binary belief/unbelief,
as the community’s attitude toward its opponents changed, the deployment
of the category of kāfir morphs accordingly. It goes from being one of the
many descriptors used to describe the believers’ opponents to becoming the
primary one, at which point it is constructed as the polar opposite of belief
( īmān),96 and from there it could, if necessary, be expanded to include Jews
and Christians. As the community grew, Waldman argues, kuffār became in-
creasingly connected with the mushrikūn until the former term folds into the
latter and begins to signify those groups that the mu minūn ought to fight
actively.
Another pejorative category of disbelief that we find in the Qur ān and as
yet another way to articulate the correct belief and practices of the Muslims is
munāfiq (pl. munāfiqūn). Like the other terms witnessed earlier, this one also
has a fairly large semantic range, and again is the name given to a particular
sūra (63). Customarily translated as “hypocrite,” munāfiqūn are the ones who
know the truth and, here they differ from the mushrikūn, actively seek to un-
dermine it through their lies and duplicity. In Q 4/140–14, for example, they
are lumped in with unbelievers (al-kuffār) as hell-bound:

Surely God is going to gather the hypocrites and the unbelievers [munāfiqūn
wa -l-kafīrūn] into Gehenna—all [of them]. [The hypocrites are] those who
wait [to see what happens] with you. If a victory comes to you from God,
they say, “were we not with you?” But if a portion [of good fortune] falls to
the kāfirūn, [the munāfiqūn] say, “Did we not prevail over you, and protect
40 Late Antique Fantasies

you from the believers [al-mu minūn]?” God will judge between you on the
Day of Resurrection [yawm al-qiyāma]. God will not make a way for the
kāfirūn over the mu minūn.

According to this passage, the munāfiqūn are condemned to hell on ac-

count of both their associations with unbelievers and their desire to spread
discord among believers. They are grouped together with the kāfirūn in other
places in the Qur ān,97 where they are again threatened with eternal punish-
ment. In the sūra that bears their name, they are accused of being liars (v. 1),
losers (v. 9), ignorant (v. 3), arrogant (v.5), and deviants when it comes to the
truth (v. 7).98 Most damningly, they are an impediment to true belief and are
constructed as the enemies of the believers. In terms of the latter, for example,
we read:

When you see them, their bodies please you, but when they speak, you
hear their speech as if they were planks of wood propped up. They think
every cry is against them. They are the enemy [aduww] so beware of them,
God fight them [qatalhum Allāh]! How deluded they are! When it is said
to them, “Come, the messenger of God will ask forgiveness for you,” they
shake their heads, and you see them turning aside [ya uddūn], and they
become arrogant [mustakbirūn]. [It is] the same to them whether you ask
forgiveness for them or you do not ask forgiveness for them. God will not
forgive them. Surely God does not guide people who are wicked [al-qawm
al-fasiqīn].99

And in Q 9/107 they are described as setting up a rival mosque in imita-

tion of the one that the believers built:

Those who have taken a mosque [to cause] harm and disbelief and divi-
sion [ irāran wa-kufran wa-tafrīqan] among the believers and [to provide]
a place of ambush for those who fought against God and His Messenger
before—they will indeed swear, “We wanted nothing but good!” But God
bears witness [yashhad]: “Surely they are liars indeed!”

Here the Qur ān portrays the munāfiqūn as actively conspiring with

the believers’ enemies. The problem with the munāfiqūn is that, unlike the
kāfirūn, who eschew false belief, they pretend to espouse correct belief in
their hearts, thereby making them even more dangerous. This is why we
 Qur ānic Others 41

read that, on the outside, they may appear pleasant to look at—to wit, they
give the appearance of being part of the community—but in their hearts
they are far removed therefrom. This is also a characteristic, as we shall wit-
ness in chapter 4, of “the Jews,” who not infrequently the Qur ān describes
as “munāfiqūn” (e.g., Q 58/14). It should not come as a surprise that the two
terms are used interchangeably.
If the Qur ān speaks of the munāfiqūn in relatively generic terms, giving the
category a wide array of meanings, in the later Islamic tradition, the category
gradually came to be more precise. In the Sīra, to be discussed in greater de-
tail in the following chapter, we are told that the leader of the munāfiqūn was
one Abd Allāh ibn Ubayy of the Medinese clan Banū ublā.100 According to
Ibn Hishām, his people turned away from him to embrace the Prophet and
“when he saw his people were determined to go over to Islam he went too,
but unwillingly, retaining his enmity and dissimulating.”101 Ibn Hishām sub-
sequently accuses him of defending the Banū Qaynuqā , a Jewish tribe that
had conspired with the enemies of Muhammad.102
This connection of munāfiqūn is further attested with another figure
that Ibn Hishām mentions as one of their key figures. According to him,
Abd Allāh ibn Ubayy was joined by one Abū Āmir Abd Amr b. Sayfī al-
Nu mān from the tribe of Aws, which some later sources say was Jewish. He
confronted Muhammad in Medina and asked him what religion he followed.
Muhammad replied, “the anīfiyya, the religion of Abraham [Ibrāhīm],” to
which al-Nu mān says, “You do not. But I do. You, Muhammad, have intro-
duced into the anīfiyya things that do not belong to it.”103
In the story of this encounter, we see how Muhammad had unequivocally
connected his religious message to Abraham and other unafā . The ene-
mies of that message accuse Muhammad of precisely that which they stand
charged. The munāfiqūn in this story are subsequently expanded to include
Jews who act in bad faith and who actively seek to undermine Muhammad,
his message, and those who believe in it. We will see this expansion in greater
detail in the following chapter.

* * *
The Qur ān provides us with one of the earliest glimpses into the social
world of the first Muslims. Even if its redaction occurred later, it nevertheless
archives a need on the part of early Muslims to begin the process of differen-
tiating their message—and, by extension, themselves—from others. On dis-
play therein is a set of rubrics, most of them used for the first time or in novel
42 Late Antique Fantasies

ways, to account for perceived social differences. In a late antique environ-

ment increasingly defined by religious competition, Muslims increasingly
see themselves as distinct. These others are the traditional religions associ-
ated with Jews and Christians who believe and practice improperly, in ad-
dition to a host of others who either do not believe or pretend to believe. All
threaten the fledgling community, just as they provided a set of textual foils to
begin the process of sorting out what were slowly becoming Muslim beliefs
from those that were increasingly seen as non-Muslim ones. From the very
beginning, in other words, the framers of (and later commentators on) the
Qur ān had numerous expressions for religious others. These expressions,
this chapter has suggested, were not simply ad hoc, but instead played a cen-
tral role in Muslim communal definition and worldmaking.
From its inception, Islam has used these others to think about themselves.
Whether as Jew or Christian, or whether as kāfir, mushrik, or munāfiq, these
religious others have powered the engine of Muslim self-awareness and self-
definition. All of these rubrics are, to be sure, highly fluid with much tax-
onomic overlap. But this fluidity and overlap were necessary as the young
community easily put others into rubrics of their own creation and could
subsequently move them around if it became clear they belonged elsewhere.
We should perhaps not be surprised at either the Qur ān’s initial inclu-
siveness or concomitant fluidity on account of at least two features. The first
is that Muhammad’s message, especially in its earliest iterations, would still
have been largely inchoate. It was quite literally still being worked out and
the qur ānic text clearly displays this (even if its ultimate redaction occurred
later). Second, the existence of other monotheists in the area who were in
possession of their own ancient traditions, meant that the early framers of
Islam had to sift through, both literally and metaphorically, the narratives of
these others to establish a genealogy for themselves. This involved excising
certain features and emphasizing others, all with the aim—as we shall wit-
ness in the following chapter—of creating alternative narratives for these
others. This, in turn, allowed the early Muslim community to further develop
its own monotheistic message as it simultaneously differentiated it from all
those who either rejected monotheism in the past or were now imagined to
have rejected but the latest version of monotheism, to wit, Islam. Eventually,
as we shall also see in the following chapter, the framers of Islam had to de-
velop another set of categories to differentiate their religion from those of
Jews and Christians, two groups that increasingly began to blur into these
more autochthonous species of unbelief.
 2
Producing Islam Through the Production
of Religious Others

It is not right that there be two qiblas in one land.1

[Muslims] have preference on the Day of Resurrection even though

[Jews and Christians] were given the Book before us.2

If the previous chapter witnessed a set of created, if autochthonous, categories

to differentiate monotheists from idolaters and believers from hypocrites, the
present one turns to how the early community expanded upon these fictional
rubrics to think about increasingly real flesh-and-blood religious others.
This was facilitated by the rapid expansion of Islam into new areas, and the
concomitant contact with various communities in possession of ancient and
deep-rooted religious traditions. Increased familiarity with these others pro-
vided an unprecedented set of opportunities for Muslim thinkers to elabo-
rate and further articulate their tradition using the narratives supplied by
other communities. In their desire to do this, however, these other commu-
nities still tended to be reduced to a set of qur ānic and largely artificial lit-
erary categories examined in the context of chapter 1.
This increased familiarity with religious others—including their beliefs,
practices, and stories—in cosmopolitan centers such as Damascus and
Baghdad further intensified the need to create, and subsequently secure,
Islam’s ancient bona fides. This was not a straightforward project, however.
If anything, it created a situation wherein these others needed to be located
within the script already provided by the Qur ān, but in such a manner that
this script could now be expanded at will and that the errors and faults of others
would be on full display. Religious others, once again, were both necessary and
anxiety producing at the same time. The perceived existential and theological
threat that these others presented to the Muslim community meant that their

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0003
44 Late Antique Fantasies

narratives had to be rewritten, safely contained, and kept at a distance. This

meant that the earliest years of Islam now had to be rethought and recalibrated
in light of contact with these ancient traditions. A not insignificant body of
literature— adīths, biography (Sīra) of Muhammad, and even historical
reflections—now became the main arena for such imaginative acts.
As this chapter will show in greater detail, such literary genres took the
increasingly discrete religious and social communities encountered by
their authors and then retroactively placed them back into the earliest pe-
riod. These genres were responsible, in other words, for creating Muslims
and others and for subsequently differentiating between them in an essen-
tialized fashion. Such tidy schemata further facilitated the project of de-
fining what Islam was, including where and how it differed from these other
religions. The unfortunate corollary of this is that we frequently mistake
these projections for the stuff of history.
If the previous chapter witnessed early Muslims seeking to disentangle and
subsequently differentiate themselves from other social groups, the present
one shows how later generations sought to impose further order on this early
period. They did this by superimposing their own sociological and religious
categories onto it so that potential social confusion and doctrinal ambiguity
could recede into the background. This temporal gap and the retroactive pro-
jection of later hard boundaries between discrete communities of “Jews,”
“Christians,” and “Muslims” further secured Islam’s distinctiveness while at
the same time showing its indebtedness to what had come before. With firm
religious differences now imagined as natural markers in the earliest period,
the Arabian Peninsula became the locus wherein a much later Islam could
now be seen to exist fully formed. Discrete religions were now imagined to
exist and interact along the lines drawn out by a later period. Such fictive
interactions are on full display in a number of genres wherein Muhammad’s
prophetic personality, and by extension his prophetic community, could be
established in light of what was slowly emerging as the normative qur ānic
narrative.
These later literary genres—perhaps best epitomized by the earliest Sīra
literature—succeeded in providing the later Muslim community with mirac-
ulous tales of their founder and, simultaneously, a religious pedigree to le-
gitimate his message. If Judaism and Christianity seemed familiar, this was
because they were now redescribed in such a manner that they could attest
to the antiquity and superiority of Islam while simultaneously being keenly
aware of their own theological shortcomings.
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 45

Into New-Old Lands

In the middle decades of the seventh century, newly formed armies from
the Arabian Peninsula conquered most of the Roman Near East and all of
the Sasanian Empire.3 These armies were inspired by, among other things,
the new religious message given to their prophet and the desire to engage,
in the words of Shoemaker, in “imperial expansion and triumph, which ex-
pected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion
of a world empire.”4 Despite the existence of a new religion in the area, it
seems quite likely that the vast majority of the newly conquered populations,
at least initially, did not convert to this movement’s new faith,5 Islam, and so
for a long time Muslims remained a small ruling minority throughout most
of the Middle East.6 The interactions between this minority and the ruled
non-Muslim majority have been the subject of a great deal of modern schol-
arly research and debate,7 and the consensus remains far from clear.
The tendency among later Muslim scholars was to argue that already in the
time of the second caliph, Umar b. al-Kha āb (r. 13–23/634–44), the ijāz
(or, by extension, the whole Arabian Peninsula) was freed from the presence
of non-Muslims through a program of expulsion8—though, as Harry Munt
has shown, the reality was most likely much more complex, with historians,
geographers, and travelers to Arabia still referring to the existence of non-
Muslim communities, even in those areas widely considered to be within the
ijāz, throughout the early Islamic centuries.9 He argues that this discrep-
ancy was the result of the increased importance of Mecca as a religious center
to subsequent generations. Only as Mecca in particular and the ijāz more
generally came to be imagined as Islam’s principal sanctuary did this region
become central to defining what it meant to be a Muslim in a world still dom-
inated by adherents of other religions.10
There is certainly qur ānic support for such a thesis. Q 9/28, for example,
warns the believers that “the idolaters [al-mushrikūn] are indeed unclean
[najas],” and that they must not be allowed near the Holy Mosque (al-masjid
al- arām). While the term mushrikūn would seem to rule out Jews and
Muslims, such an intent is not so clear, as subsequent verses reveal. This se-
mantic slippage further attests to the ambiguity of the term as will be recalled
from the previous chapter. Q 9/30, for example, states, “The Jews say, ‘Ezra is
the son of God; and the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the son of God.’ That
is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who
disbelieved [before them] [kafarū]. May Allah destroy them; how are they
46 Late Antique Fantasies

deluded?” If we transform those who disbelieve (kafarū) into disbelievers, al-

kāfirūn, we see how the term can now be used to include Jews and Muslims,
and would seem to be a natural outgrowth of the category al-mushrikūn. This
semantic slippage, so common in early Islamic literature, signals that Jews
and Christians, now designated as kāfirūn, are virtually identical to those
who worship idols (i.e., mushrikūn).
The Yemeni adīth collector and jurist Abd al-Razzāq al- an ānī (d. 211/
827), for example, commenting on the adīth that opens this chapter, writes,
“The Messenger of God said, ‘No two religions should come together in the
land of the Arabs (ar al- arab),’ or ‘the land of the Hijāz.’ So Umar inquired
after that until he had found conclusive proof (al-thabt) for it. Al-Zuhrī [sub-
sequently] said, ‘So because of that Umar expelled them.’ ”11 As Munt duly
notes, however, such statements, far from ubiquitous, actually reveal the di-
versity of opinion on this topic.12
Whether or not Jews and Christians were actually expelled from the ijāz
or the Arabian Peninsula is less my concern here than the way these groups
functioned in the Islamic imagination and the subsequent construction of
orthodoxy.13 The famed jurist A mad b. anbal (d. 241/855), for example,
denied the legal right of pre-emption to Jews and Christians to acquire pro-
perty (shuf a) there “because the Prophet said, ‘Two religions should not
join in the Arabian Peninsula.’ ”14 Based on such statements, later jurists
argued, according to Munt, that non-Muslims should not be allowed to re-
side anywhere that Muslims formed the majority population. Mu ammad
b. al- asan al-Shaybānī (d. 187/803 or 189/805), for example, claimed, “Nor
should dhimmīs be permitted to reside in cities inhabited by Muslims, for
[as stated in a Tradition] the Apostle expelled them from Medīna, and it is
related concerning [the caliph] Alī [b. Abī ālib] that he expelled them from
Kūfa.”15
From such reports we learn to just what an extent the early Muslim com-
munity had an ambiguous relationship to previous monotheisms. It cer-
tainly needed them to prove the truths of Islam, but the inverse of that
need succeeded in creating a set of tensions such that, at least according to
the aforementioned, Muslims should not even interact with them. These
tensions, reinforcing my argument here, were the direct result of later
projections. Putting them in the earliest period enabled subsequent Muslims
to try to ameliorate them in their own anxiety-filled present. Where the nas-
cent Muslim community seems to have had no problem interacting with
other monotheists,16 later Muslims were resistant to such interactions on
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 47

account of their own concerns, most of which seem to have revolved around
the possibility of undermining or tainting Muhammad’s message and thus
the fledgling community. As Islam grew, expanded, and became increas-
ingly doctrinally articulated, Jews and Christians paradoxically caused more
anxiety than they had done in earlier generations.17 Yet, and this is my main
point, these others, as literary characters, were necessary to articulate what
exactly Islam was and what it was not. Although to be avoided on the one
hand, they functioned, simultaneously, as tropes—now defanged and safe, to
be sure—to help define Islam and its others. Non-Muslims, in other words,
were needed to define who was a good Muslim and who was not.18 The non-
Muslim, and this is a leitmotif that weaves throughout this study, enabled
Muslim thinkers to create textual space to situate a variety of actors—though
often more imagined than real—within a virtual script that facilitated proper
belief and action.
The fact that some sources continue to emphasize—if not actively create—
the tradition of the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula
(or even all those places where Muslims existed as a majority) whereas
others allude to their continued existence on the other further exacerbates
this tension, revealing that the community certainly did not address the
issue unanimously.19 The point I wish to make is not whether or not non-
Muslim expulsions actually happened historically, but to argue that textually
such an expulsion was necessary, or at the very least made sense, because all
of these others—and who they actually were at this point is largely irrele-
vant—enabled the early framers of Islam to place conveniently a set of later
doctrines or beliefs onto imagined textual or textualized others and, in the
process, to stake out clearly the parameters between Islam and non-Islam.
Perhaps this is most clear in the charge leveled against “Jews” that they wor-
ship Ezra as the son of God or that Christians do the same but with Jesus.
While both worship the God of monotheism, the same God that Muslims do,
they do so in a manner that makes them mushrikūn.
There can be no doubt that these textual anxieties manifest real histor-
ical ones. Perhaps most germane here is Abd al-Malik’s establishment of
the Dome of the Rock, one of the most impressive architectural structures
of early Islam, testifying to the special nature of Jerusalem among previous
monotheists.20 While for Shoemaker this attests to the apocalyptic vision of
the early community,21 it is also worth noting that Jerusalem functioned as
a geographic place, a physical locus, that the early community needed both
for its own legitimacy and to attest to its own supersessionist superiority. The
48 Late Antique Fantasies

inscriptions from the time of the building, for example, inside the edifice and
over its northern and eastern gates, consist of qur ānic verses, most of which
attack the Trinity and the Sonship and the divinity of Jesus, while simulta-
neously referring to the authenticity of Muhammad’s mission and the ulti-
mate greatness of Islam: “Allah sent Muhammad with the Guidance and the
Religion of Truth in order to render it superior to all the other religions.”22
Jerusalem and its inhabitants, primarily Jews and Christians in the earliest
period, could now play an important role in the subsequent communal de-
lineation of Islam, the new religion.23 The issue is not that non-Muslims were
expelled from the ijāz and the Arabian Peninsula, but that certain later
Muslims wanted them to have been. This textual strategy was a major way to
attempt to alleviate the anxiety produced by non-Muslims just as it simulta-
neously allowed for the creation of Muslim holy space. The earliest period, to
sum up, was defined by socio-religious fluidity and thus became the place to
play out anxieties with others in a meaningful way. The past thus became the
way to articulate the future, and, by extension, non-Islam became the preem-
inent way to talk about Islam.

Creating Jews and Muslim

Jews and Christians, as witnessed in the previous section, increasingly

came to be defined as al-kāfirūn or al-kuffār and less as al-mushrikūn. Such
a switch facilitated the separation between early Muslims and all those in-
creasingly defined as non-Muslims. Such separation was necessary on ac-
count of the fact that both shared a common monotheism, narratives, and
a cast of characters, all of which meant that articulating the differences be-
tween the new message of Islam and its genealogical predecessors became a
central activity. With Jews and Christians now defined as al-kāfirūn, such an
activity certainly became much easier. We see this, for example, in the futū
(“conquest”) literature wherein Jews and Christians are increasingly identi-
fied with kuffār, and the wars against them become a little more than an ex-
tension of Muhammad’s wars against the kuffār and mushrikūn of Mecca.24
We also get a glimpse of this anxiety as early in the Qur ān. In Q 2/144,
for example, we read of the changing of the direction of prayer (qibla) from
Jerusalem to Mecca: “If after all the knowledge ( ilm) you have been given
you yield to their desires ( ahwā ahum), then you will surely become an evil-
doer.” Subsequent framers of Islam interpreted such verses to refer to a new
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 49

dispensation that supersedes that which was given to Jews and Christians.
In the later adīth and commentary traditions, such examples become in-
creasingly elaborated in a manner that establishes watertight boundaries be-
tween Muslims on the one hand, and Jews and Christians on the other. These
could include, for example, social aspects such as forbidding of Muslim men
from wearing side curls or performing circumcision on the seventh day, both
of which were regarded as Jewish customs.25 The Spanish theologian Abū
Bakr al- ur ūshī (d. 520/1126), for instance, relates an account in which
Muslims were encouraged explicitly not to cease from working on Friday,
as was the custom of the Jews and Christians on Saturday and Sunday, re-
spectively.26 Indeed, his Kitāb al- awadīth wa- l-bida (“Book of Misdeeds
and Innovations”) presents an attempt on the part of self-styled orthodoxy to
define “true” and “authentic” Islam in the face of what were perceived to be
various innovations on the part of those who separated from this imagined
true and authentic Islam.
Within this context, we also read of other traditions that relate how
Muslims should avoid greeting Jews and Christians first.27 Yet, other adīth
reports relate how when a pious believer looks at a church or synagogue (or,
alternatively, glances at Christians and Jews), he is to utter the shahāda imme-
diately.28 Muslims are also warned of adopting the ideas and customs of Jews
and Christians, and especially of following them in their religious practices
and rites. In terms of the latter, for example, believers were ordered not to
sway during prayer from one side to the other in the manner of the Jews.29
And al- ur ūshī further complains of the loud noises of Jews during prayer,
something that Muhammad was said to discourage.30 Tradition also records
that Muhammad sought to stop believers from talking to each other during
prayers, which was thought to be the custom of both Jews and Christians.31
These warnings, all reflective of later practices, are transposed onto the ear-
liest period as a way to delineate clear differences between Muslims and
non-Muslims.
On theological matters, believers were encouraged to refrain from en-
gaging disputants from the ahl al-kitāb regarding the veracity (or lack
thereof) of the Old and/or New Testaments. They are reminded that there
is but one holy book, the Qur ān, and that they are to believe only in it.32
Indeed, as Kister notes, there also existed adīth to the effect that Jibrīl had
initially refrained from delivering the revelation to the Prophet on account
that the latter had, in the course of his business practices, touched the hand
of a Jew. Only after the Prophet had performed the ritual ablution—again, a
50 Late Antique Fantasies

later construct—would Jibrīl consent to shaking his hand and conveying to

him the message of revelation.33
Muslim sources also reveal an ambiguity when it comes to Christians and
Christianity. Though this will be the topic of chapter 5, it is worth mentioning
that, not unlike Judaism, Christianity was a necessary component in the ed-
ifice of Islam. There are, for example, several well-known stories that relate
the crowning of Mu āwiya in Jerusalem, his prayer at Golgotha, the conclu-
sion of a pact between him and his rival Amr b. al- A (who led the Muslim
conquest of Egypt and subsequently served as its governor) in the Church of
Mary, and his helping to reconstruct the Church of Edessa.34 We also learn
that Khālid al-Qasrī, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, built a church in Kūfa
to honor his Christian mother, and that even the second Abbāsid caliph, al-
Man ūr, helped to erect a church in Damascus.35
A sharp change of this kind of attitude is in the reported information of
Umar’s prayer in the Church of Gethsemane (the Tomb of Mary—qabr
Maryam) and his subsequent regret for having done so. Such information is
provided by another Syrian tradition, that of Sa īd b. Abd al- Azīz (d. 167/
783), which recounts that “when Umar conquered Jerusalem he passed by
the Church of Maryam, made two prostrations but regretted doing so be-
cause of the Prophet’s saying, ‘that is one of the valleys of hell.’ ”36 Though
Bashear locates this shift in attitude toward Christianity to the turn of the
first century AH, he fails to account for what created this shift. Based on the
context of my argument here, it would seem that this shift is related to the
anxiety engendered by Muslims’—and, by extension, Islam’s—proximity to
Jerusalem, with the latter now functioning as a type of code for or physical
manifestation of Christianity (and, of course, also Judaism), something that
would, as Bashear notes, lead to the eventual need on the part of Muslims to
create their own sanctuary in Mecca, with their own distinct doctrines and
institutions.37
Traditions such as those recounted in this section all underscore an anx-
iety with other, earlier, and more entrenched monotheistic traditions. Those
scholars tasked with trying to articulate early Muslim dogma—and, by ex-
tension, the creation of a distinct community defined along dogmatic lines—
were forced to tap into the ancient lore and practices supplied by other
traditions as a way to justify and legitimate the new message of Muhammad.
At the same time, however, they feared that too close of a family resemblance
or set of resemblances to these earlier traditions risked undermining the new
religion by subsuming it within them.
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 51

The tensions and anxieties produced by such contexts meant that Jews,
Christians, and others made sense on a theoretical register: They were erst-
while believers who had been replaced by a new dispensation. However,
when applied to actual and existing communities of such monotheists, ex-
clusionary practices necessarily had to accompany this attitude. Jews and
Christians, in other words, were needed to make sense of Islam, but the
fear that they produced among these early framers of the tradition meant
that actual Jews and actual Christians were reduced to safe literary stereo-
types, where they could now be marginalized and be both actively and legally
resisted. What better way to articulate proper Muslim belief and practice, for
example, than to say that such beliefs and practices were the opposite of what
defined other monotheistic communities?
Such anxieties did not simply occur solely on the level of religious expres-
sion. They were, as we have just seen, also transferable to the level of social
relations. Jews and Christians—whether real or imagined is not important
at this point—threatened the umma by their very existence. They thus had
to be located in the Muslim imaginary. If subsequent theologians dealt with
actual Jews and Christians, such communities also had to be projected ret-
roactively onto the earliest period so that later Muslims could imagine how
Muhammad would have dealt with them. “Orthodox” Jews and “orthodox”
Christians were now made to exist on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of
Muhammad as a way to articulate his message by putting it in counterpoint
with what these retroactively projected Jews and Christians were also imag-
ined to do.38

Imagining Others: The Constitution of Medina (dustūr al-

madīna) and the Pact of Umar (shurū Umar)

We see these tensions on further display in two documents that, while again
later than the events with which they purport to deal, are nonetheless re-
vealing in terms of their contents. Both documents outline the conditions
that non-Muslims must assent to in order to be part of the nascent commu-
nity. If the Constitution of Medina offers us a presumed window onto the
peaceful conditions at Medina at the time of Muhammad’s arrival there, the
Pact of Umar reveals the subsequent need to differentiate the Muslim com-
munity from other believers by restricting their dress, mobility, and other
such features.
52 Late Antique Fantasies

The Constitution of Medina aimed, among other things, to determine the

relations between the early believers in the still largely inchoate message of
Muhammad on the one hand and the Jews of Medina on the other within
the framework of a new kind of political unity,39 though one not neces-
sarily foreign to the late antique Arabian Peninsula.40 The document defines
the relationship between three groups: the muhājirūn, or those among the
Quraysh who came to Medina in the first wave of emigration; the an ār, or
those former idol worshippers of Medina who converted to Islam; and some
of the Jews of Medina. According to Lecker, it is composed of two clearly
defined parts: The first includes a treaty between the mu minūn, namely the
muhājirūn and the an ār, and the second includes a nonbelligerency treaty
with the Jews.41 Those Medinan Arabs who remained idol worshippers were
not included in the treaty, nor were the majority of the Jews of Medina, in-
cluding those from the main Jewish tribes of Na īr, Quray a, and Qaynuqā .
Only one Jewish tribe, the Tha laba b. al-Fi yawn, participated.42
Although the original document was not preserved and is only known
from later literary sources, most famously the Sīrat rasūl allah,43 Michael
Lecker—one of its foremost interpreters—regards it as authentic and as
dating back to the time of the Prophet.44 Regardless of the date of composi-
tion or the original author, we witness in the Constitution an attempt to create
a common community that, in theory, glosses over religious lines. According
to the Constitution’s preamble, for example:

This is a document [kitāb] from Muhammad the prophet [governing the

relations] between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Yathrib,
and those who follow them and fight the holy war with them [wa-jāhada
ma ahum]. They are one community to the exclusion of others [innahum
umma wā ida min dūni l-nās].45

As long as there were tribes, Lecker correctly surmises, there had to be

agreements, whether formal or informal, to guarantee common respon-
sibility and cooperation between various members.46 However, there is
still no getting around the fact that the document imagines the followers
of Muhammad and the Jews as part of one faith-based community.47
Significantly, eight Jewish groups are mentioned as part of the Medinan com-
munity, but, as noted earlier, they seem to have been primarily connected
to other (non-Jewish) Arab tribes. Despite the Constitution’s desire to
create one unified umma, it nevertheless succeeds in acknowledging and
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 53

establishing religious separation between Jews and Muslims at a time when

this may have been very difficult to maintain historically. We subsequently
read, for example:

To the Jews who join us as clients will receive help and equality [wa-innahu
man tabi anā min yahūd fa-inna lahu l-na r wa l-uswa]. They will not be
wronged nor will their enemies be aided. The peace of the believers is indi-
visible [wa-inna silma l-muminīna wā ida]. A mu min will not make peace
to the exclusion of another mu min. In fighting in the cause of God [fī qitāl
fī sabīli llāh], except on the basis of fairness and equality between them.48

This document is certainly important in its desire to create a “multireli-

gious” state.49 Again, though, its anxiety over religious difference is pal-
pable. Since there would still appear to be very little separating “Jews” from
“Muslims” at the time of Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, the need to main-
tain difference with and from Jews is striking.50 While there is an acknowledg-
ment that Jews share in righteousness and sincerity (al-barru wa l-mu sin),
it is clear that they are distinct from the believers in Muhammad’s message.
The clauses that refer to them, for example, make mention of their otherness
and how they differ from the muslimūn in their midst. “Incumbent upon the
Jews is their expenditure [wa-inna alā l-yahūd nafaqatahum],” so the text
reads, “and upon the Muslims theirs [wa alā l-muslimīn nafaqatahum].”51
This need to delineate the discreteness of the two communities may well be a
later projection so as to show clearly how certain Medinan Jews—especially
those of the tribes of Banū Quray a—violated the terms of their conditions,
and thus deserved the punishment meted out to them.
If this difference is muted in the Constitution of Medina, we see it full-
blown in the so-called Pact of Umar (shurū Umar), which derives its name
on account of its attribution to the second successor (caliph) of Muhammad,
Umar b. al-Kha āb (r. 13–23/634–644). This is a work that purports to de-
fine the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, including the restrictions
imposed upon them.52 The document is an agreement allegedly made by the
Muslim conquerors, led by Abd al-Ra man ibn Ghanm (d. 78/697), and the
Christians of Damascus, or the Jazīra, which was subsequently applied to all
religious minorities (ahl al-dhimma). The document lists a series of obligations
that the conquered must enact in exchange for protection from Muslims.
These include clauses stating, if necessary, their obligation to host Muslims in
their houses and churches, and to be loyal to them, in addition to restrictive
54 Late Antique Fantasies

measures concerning their religious customs (e.g., praying quietly; refraining

from various public displays, including the sale of pork and wine), prohibitions
regarding their behavior in the presence of Muslims (e.g., not to be buried next
to them, not to peer into their houses, not to own a Muslim slave), and a series
of clauses that stress the need for social differentiation (e.g., not dressing like
Muslims, not using saddles, not teaching their children Arabic).53
My goal here is not to ascertain the historical accuracy of the Pact. In
terms of problems besetting the text, however, it is worth quoting the words
of Mark R. Cohen, who summarizes as follows:

First is the question of origins: who wrote it and when was it compiled?
Second, the question of form: why does the Pact take the odd form of a
letter from the non-Muslims to the Caliph, listing the conditions of
their subordination, rather than the form of an agreement designed by
the Caliph himself? And third, what are the sources and meaning of the
stipulations?54

Tritton, writing close to eighty years ago, argued that the text is actually
much later than the period it claims. The Pact, according to him, could never
have been made by minorities themselves, and he further notes that the
restrictions it presupposes were not known historically until the ninth cen-
tury.55 Most significantly for my purposes is his claim that the Pact portrays
a state of coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims that would have
been impossible during the days of the second caliph on account of the flu-
idity of the early Muslim umma.56
Regardless of the document’s provenance, it seems quite likely that it
was written by Muslims as opposed to religious minorities. Like other texts
examined in this chapter, it again reveals the problem non-Muslims posed
to the early Islamic imagination, only now that anxiety is not simply theo-
logical—to wit, how does Islam differ from its rivals—but also social since
it adds a set of restrictions that also relate to their bodies. Concerned that
non-Muslims might appear as too much like Muslims, religious and political
leaders now desired to restrict the non-Muslim character of the cities they
had either taken over or were creating ab novo.
The fear would seem to be that non-Muslims might seem to be indistin-
guishable from Muslims. If the previous chapter witnessed the need to carve
out religious space for the new religion by differentiating it theoretically
from other cognate religions, we see in the Pact of Umar the need to erect
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 55

and maintain social differences. With Islam now emerging as its own dis-
tinct religion, in other words, Muslims were still at risk of being mistaken for
non-Muslims (and, by extension, Islam for non-Islam) and vice versa. Non-
Muslims now had to refrain or be prevented from doing that what Muslims
did. For example, we read:

We shall not teach the Qur ān to our children.

We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it.
We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it.
We shall show respect toward the Muslims, and we shall rise from our seats
when they wish to sit.
We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims by imitating any of their
garments, the qalansuwa, the turban, footwear, or the parting of the hair.
We shall not speak as they do, nor shall we adopt their kunyas.57

Behind the discussion here would seem to be the adīth attributed to Ibn
Abbās, which in Abd al-Razzāq’s formulation reads as follows: “As for what
the Muslims established, a church will not be raised in it, nor a synagogue,
nor a cross, nor a spear-head. A horn will not be blown in it, a nāqūs will
not be sounded, and neither wine nor pig will be admitted into it. As for a
place where a peace agreement was made the Muslims are obligated to fulfill
the [terms of the] ul [initial treaties] they made with them.”58 Such reports
seem to reveal the new reality on the ground as Muslims gradually became
the dominant part of the population. Adding to the ambiguity no doubt
would have been the growing population of new Muslims, to wit, former
Christians, Jews, and others who would have sought to make sense of their
new religion by recourse to their old ones.59 To figure out their relationship
to non-Muslims, however, they needed to figure out how to deal with such
minorities. At issue, of course, is what should a city under Muslim control
look like? Could, for example, non-Muslims carry on as before? Could they
keep their houses of prayer and continue with their religious customs, espe-
cially those that took place in the public sphere? These were major questions,
the answers to which would play a major role in defining what Islam was—
not only religiously but also socially and culturally.
Although it was not always systematically or strictly enforced, especially
in the earliest period, the terms of the Pact seem to have progressively be-
come the accepted norm in subsequent centuries.60 The document would
come to replace many initial treaties ( ul ) that were made individually with
56 Late Antique Fantasies

conquered groups, many of which represented a much more tolerant ap-

proach when it came to social and religious restrictions, demanding in ge-
neral only the payment of the jizya (“poll tax” paid by ahl al-kitāb) in return
for a promise of security of life and property. The new Pact, on the contrary,
replaced these initial agreements with what was at least in theory a much
more intolerant and restrictive approach. The change in meaning highlights
to just what an extent first/seventh-century realities differed radically from
later Muslim legalism.61 It also reinforces my point that later difference was
necessary for the community and that this difference needed to be projected
back onto the earliest period.
When we put the Constitution and the Pact in counterpoint, we see clearly
how they betray a continued sense of unease in dealing with non-Muslims.
Rather than be mitigated, this unease only intensified as the community, in-
itially composed of mu minūn/muslimūn, adrift in a sea of ancient Near East
monotheisms transformed into the dominant political and religious system
in the region. The need to extricate and distinguish Islam from these other
traditions only intensified during the first century as earlier and entrenched
monotheisms became the primary means whereby Islam and Muslims in-
creasingly defined themselves. Without them, Islam would quite literally
have had no foil, or, at the very least, other foils would have had to have
been constructed. Self-definition, as I have remarked several times in this
study, needs others to provide the criteria, both positive and negative, by
which to compare and contrast. It was a rapid transformation as previous
monotheists and believers (mu minūn) became those who now refused to
become Muslims on account of their perceived stubbornness. The latter in-
creasingly found themselves with a set of often onerous religious and social
restrictions under full control of Muslim political and religious hegemony.
This represents the main difference between first/seventh-century Islamic
society and subsequent classical Islam. In the former, religious principles
were not yet fully developed, and language for dealing with non-Muslims
tended to be pragmatic and nontheological. In the latter, the ideology of
Islam as a religion and imperial system informed both the terminology and
its immediate social conditions. Common to both, however, was the need to
think through religious difference, whether real or imagined.

Ibn Hishām’s Creation of Jews and Christians

The manufacture of Jews and Christians, and their subsequent place-

ment back into the earliest period, is a leitmotif that runs through Islamic
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 57

literature.62 Not only does this retrojection allay unease since it neatly
establishes Islam at a time when there could not possibly have been Islam,
but also it aids in the imagination of difference between Muslims and other
monotheists from the very beginning. Although I shall discuss Jews and
Christians individually and in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5, it suffices
now to mention that just prior to and at the time of Muhammad, it seems
quite clear that the discrete religions of later centuries did not exist, at least
not on the Arabian Peninsula. There were certainly, as witnessed in the pre-
vious chapter, monotheistic tendencies there, some of which might have been
associated with or believed to have been associated with Jews and Christians.
It seems quite clear, though, that such tendencies did not fall either along
modern lines or along the desires of later commentators. The latter, increas-
ingly aware of more religiously normative Jews and Christians as the Muslim
armies spread into areas with ancient communities, now began to imagine
these normative Jews and Christians as existing at the time of Muhammad.
This back-projection facilitated the space for Islam’s further articulation by,
among other things, putting later doctrine into the mouth of Muhammad
and his Companions.
We see this on clear display in the Sīra, or biographical literature, associ-
ated with Muhammad. It is within this context that we must imagine the Sīra
as helping to construct and subsequently legitimate the early community by
giving it a prophetic narrative in a familiar biblical or Near Eastern mold.
This is certainly not to say that the early framers of Islam sought to copy or
otherwise plagiarize stories from others, but it is to claim that they reworked
a set of tropes, biblical and otherwise, to make sense of their prophet and ulti-
mately themselves. Once again, this is where the ambiguity resides. Muslims
needed such narratives to make sense of themselves but at the same time had
to show where others went astray. Within this context, it is certainly worth
pointing out that the earliest biography of Muhammad—the Sīrat rasūl allāh
by Ibn Is āq (d. c. 153/770), which survives in the recension by Ibn Hishām
(d. 218/833)—is by no means coeval with its subject matter. These earliest
narrative constructions of Muhammad and the earliest community, in other
words, date to roughly 150 to 200 years after 632 CE, the year that the Muslim
tradition ascribes to his death. The Sīrat rasūl allāh thus appears at a crucial
moment in the formation of Islam, and it represents an important interven-
tion in that formation.63
Ibn Is āq was the grandson of a Persian war captive brought to Medina
and was subsequently educated by his father, who was a collector of stories
about Muhammad, some of which would also be used in the process of adīth
transmission. As a young man, Ibn Is āq moved to the Abbāsid capital, the
58 Late Antique Fantasies

new city of Baghdad, where he quickly found important patrons in the new
regime. The caliph al-Man ūr, for example, employed him as a tutor and
commissioned him to write an all-encompassing history from the creation
of the world to his present time. This work, which he wrote but which does
not survive, was divided into three sections: al-mubtadā , dealing with crea-
tion up to Arabian pre-Islamic history; al-mab ath, from pre-Islamic Arabia
to the birth of Muhammad; and al-maghāzī, which includes what we might
call the more traditional biography of Muhammad. This grand narrative was
an attempt to situate Muhammad and the early Muslim polity as the center-
piece of world history. To write such a work, however, Ibn Is āq had to em-
ploy stories derived from Jews and Christians, a genre known by the name of
isrā īliyyat,64 many of which are versions of noncanonical stories that early
Muslims would have undoubtedly heard from Jews and Christians, quasi-
Jews and quasi-Christians, and/or others in their midst.65
Why did Ibn Is āq’s broad-based and all-encompassing history not sur-
vive? It seems that, as Gordon Newby duly notes, in the generation immedi-
ately after Ibn Is āq, the genre of isrā īliyyat fell into disrepute, most likely on
account of its identification with rival monotheisms, especially Judaism, at a
time when those entrusted with the articulation of Islam were attempting to
extricate the new religion from these earlier ones.66 Ibn Is āq thus employed
what would later become a problematic and politically inexpedient set of nar-
rative units. His Sīra had a paradoxical role in this formation: on the one hand
it helped to create a sense of community that was emerging from a period of
social and intellectual fluidity, but on the other, it was precisely this fluidity,
especially the danger of a retreat back into it, that threatened to undermine the
new community.
This means that subsequent recensions of Sīrat rasūl allāh, especially the
later one by Ibn Hishām, played a formative role in the creation of what was
slowly emerging as a discrete tradition at a time when some were worried
that Ibn Is āq’s original biography had showed Islam’s debt to other religions
and, in so doing, blurred lines between Muslims and others. Stories that were
now seen as too “Jewish” or too “Christian” were frowned upon if not actually
banned, even though such stories seemed to have been seen as fine a gener-
ation earlier. In the movement from Ibn Is āq’s Sīra to Ibn Hishām’s Sīra, a
span of about fifty years, we witness a sea change in Muslim self-perception.
If Ibn Is āq’s work was seen as too Jewish, Ibn Hishām’s was an attempt to
separate that which was now perceived to be Islamic from that which was
now imagined to be Jewish.
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 59

Ibn Hishām’s Sīra thus represents the end of the fluidity of early Islam and
the movement toward what will eventually become a more fixed boundary
between Islam and other monotheisms. Rather than connect Muhammad to
the salvation histories of other traditions as Ibn Is āq’s original seems to have
done, Ibn Hishām’s recension succeeded in creating a supersessionist reli-
gious tradition, one wherein Muhammad becomes the seal of the prophets
and his message, Islam, becomes the legal and spiritual fulfillment of pre-
vious religious traditions. Its motive, then, is as much political as it is reli-
gious, realizing, of course, that the political and the religious cannot be neatly
separated from one another at the end of late antiquity.
The Sīrā quite literally constructs Islam’s prophet. He is, after all, only
rarely mentioned in the Qur ān and certainly with no indication of his idi-
osyncratic personality traits.67 The early biographical literature attempts to
create the life of the man who had become or who was in the process of be-
coming most associated with divine revelation in Islam. Indeed, some might
even go so far as to argue that the biographical tradition in Islam fleshed out
an individual because the later Islamic tradition needed such a life to make
sense of the book.68 The early Sīra literature, therefore, is an early attempt
at historicization: to historicize divine revelation in the narrative context of
a human life.69 In this respect, the main goal of the biography is to estab-
lish and explain the various contexts wherein Muhammad was imagined to
have received the specifics of the Qur ān’s revelation, contexts that tradition
records as lasting over a twenty-year period.
Because of this, the Sīra is not a work of history, but one of hagiography. It is
the work of creative storytellers or myth makers seeking both to understand
and to explain Muhammad—and thus themselves—in light of narratives that
they inherited from a common Near Eastern religious, literary, and cultural
heritage. The stories that we encounter in this early biographical tradition
reveal as much about those who created them as they do about Muhammad.
Written in cosmopolitan centers, such as Baghdad and Cairo, the Sīra is an
attempt on the part of the early framers of Islam to begin the process of dif-
ferentiating what was slowly emerging as a normative Islamic tradition from
other monotheisms in the same places and locales. Again, it connects Islam
to a larger message but in the process shows how its iteration is the most su-
perior form of that message. The Sīra is an attempt to firm Islam up in centers
where such firming up was both possible and necessary. In this respect, we
need to situate the Sīra as a later and more stable attempt to impose order on
an earlier and much more ambiguous social situation.
60 Late Antique Fantasies

Let me provide a few examples of the way in which the Ibn Hishām’s Sīrat
rasūl allāh constructs Jews and Christians with an eye to carving out nec-
essary intellectual and religious space for Islam and Muslims. One such
example is the beginning of the Sīra, which, not unlike the first chapter of
the Gospel of Matthew, seeks to connect the genealogy of the Prophet to
Adam via Abraham, only now through the son Ishmael as opposed to Isaac.
Muhammad, not unlike Jesus, becomes the messianic fulfillment of biblical
prophecy. Or, again, in another story recounting Muhammad’s birth, the Sīra
describes Islam’s prophet in the following terms:

Amina bint Wahb, the mother of God’s apostle, used to say when she was
pregnant with God’s apostle that a voice would say to her, “You are pregnant
with the lord of this people and when he is born say that, ‘I will put him in
the care of the One and away from the evil of every envier; then call him
Muhammad.’ ” As she was pregnant with him she saw a light come forth
from her by which she could see the castles of Busra in Syria.70

Busra, it is perhaps worth noting, was the capital of the Ghassanid kingdom
of Arab Christians and a vassal of the Byzantine Empire. In 634, according to
tradition, the early Muslim forces captured it, making the city one of the first
important Byzantine cities to be captured. In a later section, these so-called
enviers are constructed in a way that they become synonymous with Jews,
who are increasingly seen as problematic or as a threat to Muhammad’s well-
being in this literature. For example, Abū ālib, the young Muhammad’s
uncle and guardian, meets a monk by the name of Ba īra in the desert,
who is described as “being well-versed in the knowledge of Christians”—
but interestingly not in that of the Jews—and in possession of a book that
had been handed down to him “from generation to generation [kābir an
kibr].”71 Though I will discuss this individual in greater detail in the following
chapters, it is worth noting in the present context that when Ba īra looks
at the young Muhammad’s back, he sees “the seal of prophecy [khātam al-
nubuwwa] between his shoulders in the very place described in his book.”72
Ba īra then informs Abū ālib, “Take your nephew back to his country and
guard him carefully against the Jews [al-yahūd], for by Allah! If they see him
and know about him what I know, they will do him evil: a great future lies be-
fore this nephew of yours, so take him home quickly.”73 Ba īra thus functions
as a monotheist who is able to legitimate Muhammad’s prophecy as he simul-
taneously differentiates Muhammad from “the Jews.”74
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 61

Here, once again, we see later discrete lines between religions placed ret-
roactively onto the period that is here synonymous with Muhammad’s child-
hood, a time when Islam did not even exist yet. Muslims and Islam, in other
words, had to be made distinct from other social groups and religions at a
time when they would have been anything but discrete. One final example
should suffice. Ibn Hishām’s Sīra also mentions Jewish rabbis who had ac-
cepted Islam hypocritically. “These hypocrites [munāfiqūn],” so we learn,
“used to assemble in the mosque and listen to the stories of the Muslims and
laugh and scoff at their religion.”75 Again, this is an early, and I think we could
say anachronistic, attempt to differentiate Muslims and Islam from Jews and
Judaism. There was, for example, no clear or distinct message of Islam that
one could have converted to in the earliest years since such a message would
only be worked out in subsequent generations of legists. It is also significant
that in this story we witness “Jews” (al-yahūd) and “hypocrites” used inter-
changeably with one another. Despite this, however, the Sīra still needs to
connect Muhammad to the biblical paradigm as a way to make sense of him
and, just as importantly, for others to make sense of him. It is in this light that
we must see and situate the stories of Muhammad’s preaching to the Bedouin,
emigration to Medina, and so forth. All invoke biblical precedents and help
Muslims—or Muslims who had previously been Christians or Jews— to un-
derstand the prophetic career of Muhammad.
Most importantly for my argument here, however, is that the Sīra puts
the discrete religious communities encountered in later decades back onto
Islam’s earliest period. This projection allowed later generations to witness
to just what an extent Islam was distinct, and thus distinguishable, from
competing monotheisms. Jews and Christians now became threats to the re-
ligion of Islam by working to undermine the credentials of its messenger.
The Sīra thus emerges as a work to show clearly the prophetic bona fides
of Muhammad as it simultaneously shows a set of both similarities and
differences to rival monotheisms. It is a delicate line to walk, to be sure, yet
one necessary to connect the new message to the earlier one for legitima-
tion. This necessarily meant, however, that those associated with earlier
monotheisms—particularly Jews and Christians—had to be portrayed with
characteristics that permitted negative comparisons with Muslims.
Abū Ja far Mu ammad ibn Jarīr al- abarī (d. 310/923) provides an-
other important window into the construction of early Islam. Though one
of his major works claims to be a historical account of the events, it is cer-
tainly worth noting that he is—and this is a characteristic of much of this
62 Late Antique Fantasies

literature—writing some three hundred years after the events in question.

Regardless, he represents another attempt to superimpose more norma-
tive Jews and Christians at the time of Muhammad. As was the case with
Ibn Hishām, this approach of taking later Jews and Christians and then
projecting them onto the time of Muhammad conveniently permits for the
creation of literary foils that demonstrate, if anachronistically, how Islam,
from the earliest period, was clearly distinct from its rivals. By transforming
the monotheistic denizens of the Arabian Peninsula into tenth-century Jews
and Christians, abarī further succeeds in showing the relatively young
Muslim community how, from the earliest period, Muslims represented a
distinct and discrete community of believers.
His Tārīkh al-rusul wa l-mulūk (“History of the Prophets and Kings”)
presents a universal history from the time of creation until his own day. The
importance of establishing such a sweeping genealogy for the fledgling com-
munity provides a necessary chronological structure to situate both pre-
Islam, which will be the subject of the following chapter, and Muhammad.
It also seeks, as did Ibn Hishām’s Sīra, to situate the rise of Islam within the
ebb and flow of world history. After an attempt to create the genealogy of
Muhammad—through both his own family and, by extension, biblical
prophets such as Adam, Abraham, and Ishmael—al- abarī turns his atten-
tion to establishing the prophetic bona fides of Muhammad presumably for
audiences (Muslim, new Muslim, and non-Muslim) familiar enough with
biblical precedent.76 Most importantly, Muhammad must be seen to be
completely removed from pagan practices. According to al- abarī, Alī, the
Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, once said:

I heard the Messenger of God saying, “I was only tempted to take part in
the heathen practices on two occasions, and both times God prevented me
from doing what I wanted. After that I was never tempted to evil, right up
to the time when God honored me by making me his Messenger. One night
I said to a lad from the Quraysh, who was guarding flocks with me in the
high ground of Mecca: ‘Will you watch this flock for me so that I can go
into Mecca and spend an evening there like other young men?’ He agreed
so I set off with the object in mind. When I came to the first settlement
in Mecca I heard the sound of tambourines and pipes, and I asked what
was happening. They said that a wedding was taking place, so I sat down to
watch them. But God prevented me from hearing, and I went to sleep and
did not wake up until I felt the touch of the sun.”77
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 63

The story continues with Muhammad returning to Mecca and once again
falling asleep when he hears the sounds of the instruments. The later Islamic
tradition, of which al- abarī is certainly a part, has to imagine Muhammad
as ontologically separate from anything approximating “pagan” practices,
such as those associated with pre-Islamic weddings. In like manner, as we
saw in the previous chapter, the future prophet of God also could not be as-
sociated with other monotheistic traditions, lest the suspicion arise that he
was somehow part of or otherwise influenced by them. Again, there is a very
fine line to tread: Muhammad or at least his message was influenced by these
other traditions as this is what ultimately powered his message, and, as such,
all later commentators emphasized certain of these continuities; but such
influences and convergences had to be checked on some level to show that
Muhammad’s message possessed a purity that the others lacked on account
of corruption.
As was symbolized in the account of the monk Ba īra earlier, these other
monotheisms—or, at least, representatives therefrom—had to attest to
Muhammad’s prophecy. We thus read of his mission before it even occurs.
In the following passage Zayd b. Amr b. Nufayl, a anīf,78 was said to have
remarked:

I expect a prophet from the descendants of Ishmael, in particular from the

descendants of Abd al-Mu alib. I do not think that I shall live to see him,
but I believe in him, proclaim the truth of his message, and testify that he
is a prophet. . . . He will be a man who is neither short nor tall, whose hair
is neither abundant nor sparse, whose eyes are always red, and has the seal
of prophethood between his shoulders. His name is A med [a variant of
Muhammad], and this town [i.e., Mecca] is his birthplace and the place in
which he will commence his mission. Then his people will drive him out
and hate the message which he brings, and he will emigrate to Yathrib and
triumph. Beware lest you fail to recognize him. I have travelled around
every land in search of the faith of Abraham. Every person whom I ask,
whether Jew, Christian, or Magian, says, “this faith lies where you have
come from,” and they describe him as I have described him to you. They all
say that no prophet remains but he.79

All monotheisms in the region, at least according to this account, were

cognizant of Muhammad’s imminent arrival. His message, though certainly
familiar to these audiences, nevertheless is distinct in that it retains a purity
64 Late Antique Fantasies

that the others lack and given the fact that it will be a uniquely Arabic one.
Indeed, al- abarī seeks to construct a grand architectural edifice in his Tārīkh
al-rusul wa l-mulūk, one that situates the ancient Israelites as part of the larger
divine plan that will ultimately culminate in the Arabs, Muhammad, and his
message. There is, like the Sīra, a real supersessionist message to al- abarī’s
history. Jews, for example, are guilty of failing to heed the warnings of their
prophets. Picking up a major theme of the Qur ān, abarī informs us that
they refused, for example, to listen to Jeremiah:

God had sent him as a prophet to warn the Children of Israel of what
Nebuchadnezzar was to bring upon them, and to tell them that unless
they repented and gave up their evil deeds, God would visit upon them
the power that would slay their fighting men and capture their children.
Nebuchadnezzar said to Jeremiah, “What is it you want?” Jeremiah then
told him that God had sent him to warn the Israelites of what was to be-
fall them, but they did not believe it and imprisoned him. Nebuchadnezzar
said, “Wretched people, they defied their Lord’s messenger.” He then
released Jeremiah and treated him well.80

This passage is significant for at least two reasons. First, it shows the stub-
bornness of the Jews, a common trope in Christian supersessionist literature
from the late antique period, something that will be picked up by subse-
quent Muslim interpreters. Jews are so stubborn, we read here, that they are
willing to throw their own prophets in jail. This is another theme in this liter-
ature: The Jews, unlike Muslims, persecute prophets. Not even the Meccans,
it is implied, would stoop to such a level. Muslims, in other words, and unlike
Jews, are willing to heed the cries, messages, and warnings of their prophet.
Again, we see just how Jews are constructed as the exemplar of what Muslims
are not and what the latter are not to become. The Jews, according to him,
“were guilty of acts of disobedience, violated prohibitions, and forgot what
God had done for them, and that he had saved them from their enemy.”81 In
reply to Jeremiah’s plea that he is unworthy, God responds both in tone and in
words that would be familiar to anyone with an understanding of the Qur ān:

Do you not know that everything issues from my will, and that all hearts and
tongues are in My hands? I turn them at My will, and they obey Me. I am the
incomparable God. By My word arose heaven and earth and whatever is in
them. I address the seas, and they hearken to My word. I command them,
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 65

and they comply with My order. I set limits to them in the plain, and there is
no violation of My boundary. In mountain-like waves they come but when
they reach the limit I have set, in fear and cognizance of My decree, they are
enveloped in humbleness and obedience to Me.82

Jews, like Christians—and this is a common theme running throughout

the length and breadth of Islamic theology—were offered the same message
as Muhammad and the Arabs. Whereas the former ignored it or pretended to
accept it, so the narrative goes, the latter accepted it fully.
Second, al- abarī also informs us how the Jews got to the ijāz, particu-
larly Yathrib (later to be renamed Medina) and Wādi al-Qurā.83 Though this
will, in part, be the subject matter of chapter 4, it should suffice that implicit
in his comments is that ijāzī Jews are descendants of those who had previ-
ously acted in bad faith by, among other things, jailing their prophets. In an-
other context, al- abarī informs us that these Jews of Medina, unbeknownst
to them, were part of the divine plan to bring Arab tribes in its environs to
Islam. According to him:

One of the things that God had done for them in order to prepare them for
Islam was that the Jews lived with them in their land. The Jews were people
of scripture and knowledge, while the Banū Khazraj were polytheists and
idolaters. They had gained the mastery over the Jews in the land, and when-
ever any dispute arose among them the Jews would say to them, “A prophet
will be sent soon. His time is at hand. We shall follow him, and with him
as our leader we shall kill you as `Ad and Iram were killed.” When the
Messenger of God spoke to [the Khazraj] and called them to God, they said
to one another, “Take note! This, by God, is the prophet with whom the
Jews are menacing you. Do not let them be before you in accepting him.”84

Here we see clearly how “the Jews” functioned for Muslims in the ninth
century. Although acknowledged to have a scripture of their own, they have
scuppered its message. While they function as a testimony to divine reve-
lation on the one hand, they represent the refusal to accept it on the other.
They thus become the polar opposite of the way Muslims are to act toward
the same message. By putting their stubbornness back into the imagined
historical record, thinkers like Ibn Is āq and al- abarī show their readers
how not to respond to Islam. Just as Muhammad had a clear choice not to
succumb to either Arabian polytheism or one of the other monotheistic
66 Late Antique Fantasies

religions, contemporary Muslims must also realize the importance of faith

in divine will.

* * *
This chapter has revolved around back-projections, showing how later
commentators sought to clear space for Islam by making it appear fully
formed at the time of Muhammad. Though historically such claims are cer-
tainly anachronistic, my interest is less with our authors’ lack of historical
objectivity and more in why they would make such claims in the first place.
I have tried to argue that this was the direct result of their desire to separate
Islam from non-Islam, and Muslims from non-Muslims, with an eye toward
showing just how the former of each of these two binaries differed from the
latter.
Claims that Muslims expelled non-Muslims from the ijāz or other areas
project a wish fulfillment that further reveals the anxiety religious others
posed for Muslim authors. Islam, and our authors expend considerable en-
ergy trying to demonstrate this, had to be shown to be a superior version
of these other religions. The need for differentiation was not simply literary
or theological, however; it was also done to serve a host of social and legal
reasons. Muslims were forbidden from engaging in certain practices that
were imagined as too Jewish or as too Christian. The existence of such tex-
tual admonitions would seem to indicate that Muslims were in reality en-
gaging in such practices. Non-Muslims, in like manner, were forbidden—at
least textually—from dressing like Muslims or even from teaching their chil-
dren Arabic. The debt that Muslims and, by extension, Islam owed to other
religions became a very heavy one.
We see this clearly in the works of those like Ibn Hishām and al- abarī,
two authors who sought to present “historical” accounts of Muhammad and
the origins of Islam. Again, both were familiar with the tropes, narratives,
and categories of analysis of other religions, and both had no problem
employing them so that their audiences could more fully understand Islam’s
genealogy and its subsequent emergence. This debt had to be mitigated by
showing, among other things, Jewish malfeasance, pagan malpractice, and
Christian error. To do this, both of these authors took the clear divisions be-
tween Muslims and non-Muslims of their own day and transferred them
onto the past. This had the effect of clarifying (anachronistically) Islam at the
earliest period and simultaneously making it clear that Islam had, despite the
objections of religious others, superseded them.
 Islam Through the Production of Religious Others 67

All of this demanded a grand narrative—one that charted the rise and fall,
the sin and redemption, and the obedience and subsequent transgression
imagined in biblical proportions—that had to be articulated. As we shall see
in the following chapter, the jāhiliyya, a term as invented as any of the others
discussed thus far, would come to fulfill that role. This term, and all that it
represented, provided later Muslim thinkers with a convenient space in
which all of the back-projections witnessed previously could freely interact
with one another.
 3
Past Perfect
Opening the Jāhiliyya’s Complex Present

Verily, the bonds of Islam will be undone, one by one, only if there
arise people in Islam who never knew of the jāhiliyya.1

Jāhiliyya is not a period of time, but a condition, a condition which

existed yesterday, exists today, and will exist tomorrow.2

Origin myths are foundational to religious understanding. Presented with a

degree of alacrity that often bypasses the messiness of history, such narratives
claim to offer tidy accounts of the way things should have been and thus should
continue to be.3 Though created and projected retroactively, such narratives
ameliorate complexity, providing future generations with a unique sense of self.
The result is that these idealized portraits provide an all too convenient script
that facilitates the world-making process. Since all groups have to imagine and
fashion themselves as distinct, myths of origins by definition also provide myths
of others. Differences between self and other, no matter how slight or indistinct,
can then be sublimated to the level of ontology or divine will.
Previous chapters have witnessed the creation of a set of categories, as ar-
tificial as they were necessary, to differentiate the early umma from other
communities with which it was in contact and with which it was ultimately
in competition. Believers, as we have seen, had to be sorted out from the nu-
merous species of unbelievers and then imagined to exist at a time when it
could not possibly be certain what proper Muslim belief consisted of. Perhaps
this is most clearly on display in works such as the Sīra literature and al-
abarī’s history, where the discreteness of later centuries is projected back
onto the earliest period. Such later projections were necessary as the young
community—long on political hegemony but short on religious bona fides—
sought to understand itself and its relationship to the various religious others

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0004
 Past Perfect 69

with which it interacted. A fundamental question we must ask ourselves

is: How did this young community understand its own past—both what actu-
ally happened and what it wanted to happen? How, in other words, could this
later community imagine and subsequently manufacture a past that would
reflect its own unique set of concerns? This was not necessarily an easy project
since many and often contrary traits had to be navigated. If the past was one of
chaos associated with pre-Islam, it also had to take on a set of characteristics
that would make Islam possible.
A chaotic and unwieldly past thus had to be rearranged and given a new
name to make sense of the present. Such an act had to be done teleolog-
ically and in such a manner that the past was but a necessary step on the
road leading up to and culminating in the monotheistic message brought by
Muhammad. With this the jāhiliyya was born. Though I shall defer defining
what exactly this term means, it should suffice to mention at the outset that
it, like so many of the terms discussed in previous chapters, was an open-
ended category under which could be subsumed any number of different
and often opposed characteristics. Even the two quotations that open this
chapter reveal something of this ambiguity: Is the jāhiliyya political, indi-
vidual, civilizational, or something altogether different? As was the case with
these other terms, jāhiliyya could be used in a variety of different and even
competing contexts but almost always with an eye toward bringing ortho-
doxy into clearer focus and, once in focus, aiding in the sharpening of its
ideological edge.
Orthodoxy, as we have also seen, has to emerge from somewhere. It does
not simply appear, as previous generations of scholars assumed, wholly
formed ex nihilo, and in such a manner that various heterodoxies only
emerge after the fact to challenge its supremacy.4 In the words of David
Brakke, a historian of early Christianity, there is the idea, going all the way
back to the third century, that

there always was a simple true orthodox faith, and any Christian “diversity”
simply reflects demonically inspired heretical movements. . . . The North
African theologian Tertullian [d. 220] was the first to clearly articulate the
idea, which claims that “heretics” always reject or distort orthodox main-
stream, or widely shared Christian ideas and practices. And so orthodoxy
precedes heresy, both in time—orthodoxy came first, with original apos-
tles—and in logic—heretical teachings distort or oppose orthodox ones.5
70 Late Antique Fantasies

Orthodoxy, on this reading, emerges subsequent to and then dialectically

with what is only retroactively labeled as heterodoxy. It is a political process,
to be sure. Purveyors of orthodoxy dislike that which appears to be different
(in terms of belief, doctrine, and so on) and, as a result, seek to ostracize, ex-
communicate, or otherwise put an end to “heterodox” belief and/or praxis.
According to Daniel Boyarin:

Once I am no longer prepared to think in terms of preexistent different enti-

ties— religions, if you will—that came (gradually or suddenly) to enact their
difference in a “parting of the ways,” I need to ask who it was in antiquity who
desired to make such a difference, how did they accomplish (or seek to ac-
complish) that making, and what was it that drove them? . . . My proposal here
is that the discourse we know of as orthodoxy and heresy provides at least one
crucial site for the excavation of a genealogy of Judaism and Christianity. . . .
Authorities on both sides tried to establish a border, a line that, when crossed,
meant that someone had definitely left one group for another.6

Heterodoxy, often reduced to taint and/or infiltration from external

sources, produces a fear among those classes charged with ascertaining
“mainstream” doctrine and belief. They label as “incorrect” all that
compromises what they imagine as “correct.” Heterodoxy, in other words,
undermines from within and risks destabilizing a community that prides it-
self on the possession of divine truth. Correct belief/practice, not surpris-
ingly, is articulated as the inverse of those beliefs/practices imagined to be in
opposition to it. Proper belief demands improper belief, just as correct praxis
cannot exist without incorrect praxis. In the present chapter, we witness once
again just how the anxieties produced by the contact and subsequent interac-
tion with others further contributed to self-definition. The categories exam-
ined previously now perform real existential and ontological work in the
creation of an imagined mythic past. This past could then be used as the map
to chart the path for the further articulation of what would eventually emerge
as a form of Sunnī exceptionalism.

Defining Jāhiliyya

The categories and their subsequent development witnessed previously

needed genealogies. Terms initially deployed in the Qur ān to designate
 Past Perfect 71

believers, unbelievers, and everything in between now took on greater focus

in the shadow of emerging orthodoxy. Though called al-jāhiliyya, we must
be aware that it is a category no less created and then vectored into the sub-
sequent Islamic tradition than those described in previous chapters. Most
important for my argument here is that the jāhiliyya offered a context to un-
derstand further these qur ānic typologies of religious others by providing a
mise-en-scène wherein they could be made to interact with one another.
Islam was needed to make sense of the jāhiliyya; in other words, just as
the jāhiliyya was needed to situate the emergence of Islam, the two terms
are thus dialectic and each needs the other for its definition and subsequent
articulation.7 If Islam, like any other religion, had to supersede religiously
and spiritually that which came before, it also had to reckon with its own im-
mediate context. Jāhiliyya, as we shall see, proved to be no easy inheritance.
It had to be transcended, as it simultaneously needed to provide the prime
matter from which the emergent message, and the community that believed
in it, could be constructed. For these and related reasons, the period prior to
the advent of Islam—at least from the vantage point of the future—ultimately
ended up possessing a number of often contradictory characteristics.
The jāhiliyya, of course, does not provide us with the stuff of history. The
early exegetes were decidedly not interested in creating a chronologically ac-
curate or doctrinally specific account of pre-Islamic Arabia. What they were
interested in was manufacturing the jāhiliyya as a foil to what would emerge
out of it. Connected to the root jahl, with its connotations of ignorance and
passion, jāhiliyya, commonly translated as the “Age of Ignorance,”8 is associ-
ated with, in the words of Peter Webb, “four archetypal topoi: idol worship,
tyranny/injustice, ritual killing of baby girls, and violence of vainglorious
tribal antagonisms.”9 Despite its clear investiture in ideology, many modern
commentators are surprisingly content to buy into this later Muslim narra-
tive of origins. Chase Robinson, for example, translates the term as “the Age
of Obstinate Impetuosity” and defines it as an era marked by “barbarians”
with “no learning to speak of.”10 And Michael Cook refers to the period as
“barbarous” and negatively compares the Arabian Peninsula at this time with
the “civilizations” of the ancient Near East.11
One thing that is certain is that it is highly unlikely that the jāhiliyya
was an actual period of immorality, paganism, and anarchy. Such a state-
ment ignores other monotheisms in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula,
just as it clearly overlooks forms of tribal governance and the political alli-
ance between them and with larger empires in the region.12 Assessments of
72 Late Antique Fantasies

ignorance are clearly later projections created with the intent to situate the
new message. Despite the fact that the jāhiliyya remains unfairly character-
ized by the stigma of negative associations, we instead need to see it as yet
another attempt whereby the later Muslim community made sense of them-
selves by making sense of others.
The jāhiliyya is thus less a period of time that can be neatly located on a
historical grid than it is an attempt to offer a normative description of a way
of life imagined to exist prior to the advent of Islam.13 Fueling this assessment
is the fact that the subsequent Muslim literary tradition could rarely agree
on what it was, when it occurred, for how long it was in existence, where it
existed, and so on. Indeed, as we shall soon see, it also took on, nostalgically,
a set of positive manly and linguistic characteristics, especially in the later
poetic tradition, since it was also the period out of which Islam, and its pure
language of Arabic, ultimately emerged triumphant. Those who initially re-
ceived the message and the pure language it was imagined to be delivered in
were ultimately, after all, the products of the jāhiliyya. It was only under the
auspices of pre-Islam, then, that the purity and original intent of the qur ānic
message could truly be understood and appreciated on its own terms.

Typologizing Jāhiliyya

In an important study, Peter Webb has shown the numerous semantic shifts
that the term jāhiliyya underwent in Arabic lexicography and qur ānic exe-
gesis between the third/ninth and seventh/thirteenth centuries.14 He argues
that, despite the ubiquity of the term across Arabic literature from the Qur ān
into modern times,15 it did not always connote the same meaning diachron-
ically.16 It was only after the fourth/tenth century that the now common
jāhiliyya stereotypes—for example, of ignorance, lawlessness, and female in-
fanticide—became synonymous with pre-Islam. Like other technical terms
encountered in this study, we witness a term’s metamorphosis and transfor-
mation contingent upon the changing morphology of the community that
employs it.
The later concept of jāhiliyya largely derives from the Qur ān’s four citations
of the word (3/154, 5/50, 33/33, 48/26). Such qur ānic references do not seem
to be qualitatively different from its usage in pre-Islamic times, where it was
frequently associated with imprudence.17 The pre-Islamic poet al-Nābigha,
for example, informs us that an Arab ignorant of his tribe’s lineage is defined
 Past Perfect 73

by jahl and safāha (idiocy), implying both lack of knowledge and foolhar-
diness.18 The Qur ān, then, transforms this largely tribal and sociological
term into a religious one. A person guilty of jahl now is someone who holds
false notions concerning God and who has misunderstood divine will and,
whether willfully or not, has chosen not to become a monotheist.19
In Q 3/154, jāhiliyya is put in counterpoint with truth ( aqq), from which
it is then quickly distinguished so that they become antonyms. Then, again,
in Q 5/49–50, Muhammad is given a warning to avoid all of those who refuse
to listen to his message, and who, in their disobedience, desire a return to
some sort of “time of ignorance” (hukm al-jāhiliyya):

And judge, [O Muhammad], between them by what God has revealed and
do not follow their inclinations and beware of them, lest they tempt you
away from some of what God has revealed to you. And if they turn away—
then know that God only intends to afflict them with some of their [own]
sins. And indeed, many among the people are defiantly disobedient. Then
is it the judgement of ignorance [hukm al-jāhiliyya] they desire? But who is
better than God in judgement for a people who are certain [in faith].

Though not referring to a particular period of time, as it would come to be

employed subsequently, it seems clear from verses such as these that jāhiliyya
refers less to a historical period and more to a state of mind. It is one largely
inhabited by the cast of characters witnessed in previous chapters, such as
mushrikūn and kāfirūn. The Qur ān differentiates it sharply, in other words,
from Muhammad’s message of monotheism. In Q 33/33, the wives of the
Prophet are warned from showing themselves (tabarrajna) as they had pre-
viously in the jāhiliyya. In this latter verse the term seems to be a marker of
time in the sense that the Prophet’s wives behaved differently prior to either
the advent of Islam or their own conversions. The verse also refers to “al-
jāhiliyya al-ūlā” (the first or ancient jāhiliyya). In an admonition directed at
women’s modesty, the verse implies that Muhammad’s wives are warned to
“stay in your homes and do not make a display of yourselves in the manner of
the first/ancient Jāhiliyya.”20
Finally, Q 48/26 would seem to come closest to that way in which the later
Islamic tradition would understand the term:

Those who disbelieved [kafarū] put into their hearts chauvinism—the

chauvinism of the time of ignorance [al-jāhiliyya]. But God sent down
74 Late Antique Fantasies

His assurance [sākina] upon His Messenger and upon the believers [al-
mu minūn] and imposed upon them the word of righteousness [kalima al-
taqwa], and they were more deserving and worthy of it. And ever is Allah,
of all things, Knowing.

Here again we see a pairing reminiscent of the types encountered in

chapter 1, namely, that between mu minūn and kāfirūn, those who believe
in Muhammad’s message and those who do not. However, what is new here
is the manner whereby the latter is now connected to those unbelievers that
existed in the jāhiliyya. We thus see a correspondence between contempo-
raneous nonbelievers and those who existed prior to Islam as neither Jews
nor Christians, or unafā , though it is worth noting that the term does not
so much imply an actual “historical” period—to wit, pre-Islam—than some
generic state of unbelief, “un-Islam,” one that can emerge even in the midst
of Islam.21 It is this latter moral state, as Webb terms it, that would be subse-
quently translated onto a “historical” register in the post-qur ānic period.22
Al-Tirmidhī, for example, relates a adīth report, wherein Muhammad, upon
see a shooting star in the nighttime sky, asks his companions, “What sign
would you draw from this in al-jāhiliyya?”23 Keeping in mind the problems
associated with dating adīth, it is certainly unclear whether or not the his-
torical Muhammad himself would have used jāhiliyya in this manner.24
Webb also suggests that early Muslims might have used the term jāhiliyya
to refer to themselves prior to their conversion to Islam. Before they became
Muslims, in other words, they existed in a state of ignorance. It is plausible
that early Muslim converts, at least on this reading, used jāhiliyya with its
qur ānic connotations to describe the ways of non-Muslims in general and, by
extension, their own behavior before they embraced Islam. Only later would
the term be used more technically to refer to an entire period before the ad-
vent of Islam.25 By the time we arrive at the second and third generations of
the Muslim community, when individual recollections of preconverted life
had grown dim and perhaps been largely forgotten, jāhiliyya could no longer
practically connote individualized pre-Islamic pasts. At this point, Webb
argues the term came to be used more generically and “historically,” thereby
becoming a communal locution, and from there into a terminus technicus
for an entire past that existed prior to Islam’s advent. Jāhiliyya now became
coded as the period prior to the advent of Muhammad, the era into which
he was born, and the foil with which to situate and subsequently understand
Muslim society.26
 Past Perfect 75

Later commentators gradually began to expand upon this traditional

meaning of jāhiliyya. In his Lisān al- Arab, for example, Ibn Man ūr (d. 711/
1311) explained that the term referred to “the state of the Arabs before Islam,
consisting of an ignorance of God Almighty and the religious laws, and [a
time] of boasting about genealogy, arrogance, despotism and the like,”27
though it might be worth noting that there was certainly not anything approx-
imating uniformity among commentators in this regard. In his commentary
to Q 5/50, Muqātil (d. 150/767) refers to the “ ukm al-jāhiliyya” as “the iniq-
uity [jawr] of the leaders [ru ūs] of the Medinan Jews” before Muhammad’s
arrival there in 622.28 In so doing, Muqātil restricts the jāhiliyya to the period
prior to Muhammad’s message and interestingly connects it to Jewish lead-
ership.29 Perhaps the most famous qur ānic exegete of all, al- abarī (d. 310/
923), writing roughly 150 years later, uses the term to refer not so much to a
period of time but to “the morals of the unbelievers [akhlāq ahl al-kufr].”30
Jāhiliyya, on this reading at least, is temporally unspecific and more a state
of being.
It should suffice to say by way of conclusion to the present section that the
term jāhiliyya could subsume within itself multiple meanings. Before I ex-
amine these in greater detail, however, I turn briefly to a slightly different
use of the term, one that would seem to retain a positive valence on account
of its ability to help define or articulate a distinct Arab identity.31 In this par-
allel use of the term, jāhiliyya is what permitted later Muslims to connect the
concepts of Arabization with Islamicization, showing how the two terms or
processes were intimately and inextricably connected to one another. Since
Muhammad had to come from somewhere and had to exist in a state un-
tainted by terms such as kufr or shirk, that is, those terms signifying the oppo-
site of Islam, the fact remained that he still was an Arab, and his message was
increasingly defined as a pure Arabic revelation. As a result, jāhiliyya became
connected, at least for some, to positive traits associated with the unafā , the
category that played a large role in situating the rise, career, and message of
Islam’s Prophet.

Jāhiliyya: Clearing an Arab Space for the Rise of Islam

Since jahl literally means “ignorance” and islām “submission,” they do not
immediately come to mind as opposites. Submission, after all, is not the polar
opposite of ignorance. For the two technical terms to be put in counterpoint,
76 Late Antique Fantasies

they had to be stripped of their original meanings, “historicized,” and then

periodized. This is precisely what the later Arabo-Islamic literary tradi-
tion did. Since islām, as a state of being, abrogated ignorance or a dearth of
knowledge, it was only a matter of time before jahl would take on both the
meaning and characteristics of “nonsubmission,” beginning to signify all that
was the opposite of Islam. Jāhiliyya, as an ontic state, could then become a re-
ceptacle onto which could be projected any number of stereotypes or charac-
teristics diametrically opposed to its newly created opposite, to wit, Islam.32
According to J. Stetkevych, “all ‘falsehood’ and all ‘truth’ were forever abso-
lutely differentiated into some timeless pre-revelation (the age of Jāhiliyya)
that was followed by an equally timeless revelation (the Qur ān). . . . An abso-
lute binary breakdown of ideated time thus became instituted.”33
We see the beginnings of the construction of this retroactive boundary in
the work of Hishām ibn Mu ammad ibn Kalbī (d. 204/819), a collector of
information about the genealogies and history of the pre-Islamic Arabs. He
works on the assumption that the Arabs were the descendants of Abraham
through Ishmael, and in this regard he repeats the notion, common in the
third/ninth century, that the ancient Arabs were originally monotheists.34
The problem, however, as he makes clear in his Kitāb al-a nām (“Book of
Idols”), is that Arabs degenerated into a state of jāhiliyya. He blames this on
the fact that Arabs would take stones from the ka ba in Mecca as souvenirs or
mementos, and that they subsequently began to circumambulate them in the
same manner in which they had previously done around the ka ba. In time,
however,

this led them to the worship of whatever took their fancy, and caused them
to forget their former worship. They exchanged the religion of Abraham
and Ishmael for one another. Consequently, they took to the worship
of images, becoming like the nations before them. They sought and de-
termined what the people of Noah had worshipped of these images and
adopted the worship of those which were still remembered among them.
Among these devotional practices were some which came down from the
time of Abraham and Ishmael, such as the veneration of the house [i.e.,
ka ba] and its circumambulation.35

As we shall see later, however, for Ibn Kalbī the jāhiliyya was not all bad.
Indeed, as witnessed earlier, it could not be since it ultimately produced
the prime matter from which Muhammad and his message emerged. They
 Past Perfect 77

formed two sides of the same coin, and each needed the other for its own
definition. This mutuality, in keeping with the theme of this study, is what
permitted each to receive its own set of characteristics based on the opposite
of what was perceived to exist, to use another metaphor, on the other side of
an imaginary line. With time, such taxonomic differences were sublimated to
the level of metaphysics.
Though Ibn Kalbī acknowledges that the jāhiliyya was preceded by a pe-
riod of prelapsarian monotheism, followed by a gradual decline into a period
of idol worship and corruption, he nonetheless emphasizes—and this is, as
we shall see, a common theme in this literature—the traces of monotheism
even in such polytheistic practice. In a passage that continues the aforemen-
tioned, for example, we read that the Arab tribes

would thus declare His unity through the talbiyah [salutation for the deity]
and at the same time associate their gods with Him by placing their affairs
in His hands. Consequently, God said to His prophet, “and most of them be-
lieve not in associating other deities with Him” [Q 12/106]. In other words,
they would not declare His unity through the knowledge of His rightful
dues, without associating with Him some of His own creatures.36

Though Ibn Kalbī here recognizes the sharp distinctions between jāhiliyya
and islām, pre-Islam and Islam, he is unable or unwilling to draw a stark on-
tological border between the two. This is because he needs to show that Islam
was not an unnatural imposition on the Arabs, but a natural extension of
what existed prior to its advent. While he acknowledges massive differences
between the two periods—though remember, of course, that he is writing
over two hundred years after the fact—he does so in such a manner that they
are not necessarily and completely distinct, which, as we have seen, they
cannot be by definition.

Jāhiliyya as Heroic Paradise

The jāhiliyya, the time of jahl, as Jaroslav Stetkevych reminds us, was not
just a time of “ignorance” or “not knowing,” but rather one of “knowing no
other [way].”37 It was, in other words, a period intimately connected to the
pre-Islamic Arab warrior’s fierceness, heroism, and zeal. It was not simply
contingent upon the dearth of an ethical ideal, according to him, but on the
78 Late Antique Fantasies

“adrenergic,” the bravado of masculinity.38 The concept or category must

have signified such a powerful sentiment among the early Muslims, he
reasons, since it was slowly characterized as Islam’s inversion.39 The binary
islām/jāhiliyya would soon carry in its wake a host of others, such as that of
justice/tyranny, canon/noncanon, and truth/perfidy.
In this regard, the advent of Islam signaled—perhaps at the time, but most
certainly in retrospect—the creation of a new Arab and a new Arabia. For
one thing, it permitted, as Robert Hoyland has argued, an idea of Arabness,
a fluid and elastic category that could subsequently be used in any number
of different and even competing ways.40 In like manner, it was a new Arabia,
a newly imagined geopolitical entity, that demarcated “the Arabs” from
other religious and ethnic groups, something that would play a significant
role as Muslims expanded into predominantly non-Muslim and non-Arab-
speaking regions.41 Like other terms examined, “the Arabs” could also be de-
fined in any number of ways dependent upon the need of those doing the
constructing.
Running parallel to jāhiliyya as a period of ignorance, in other words, was
jāhiliyya as an era of heroism and poetry.42 This connection to ferocity and
manly virtue could, in the proper hands, become transformed into some-
thing positive. As Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych reminds us, this positive
portrayal of the jāhiliyya in subsequent Arabic literature, especially of the
Abbāsid period, coincided with the aforementioned negative portrayal.43
The jāhiliyya, according to this tradition, represented a “golden age” that de-
fined a set of heroic virtues and noble deeds from which the present had woe-
fully lapsed.44 According to Ibn Rashīq, for example:

The Arabs needed to sing about their nobility of their character, the pu-
rity of their bloodline and to recall their battle-days of old and their far-
away abodes, their brave horsemen and compliant steeds, in order to incite
themselves to nobility and inform their sons of their good character . . . to
perpetuate memorable deeds, strengthen their honor, guard the tribe, and
to inspire the awe of other tribes since others would not advance against
them out of fear of their poet.45

It was up to the poet to reconcile the perceived virtues of the jāhiliyya with
the vices that the Islamic theological tradition was slowly attaching to it. If
the former depicted a timeless heroic age as reflected, for example, in pre-
Islamic poetry, the former catalogs the chronological evolution of human
 Past Perfect 79

history toward the Prophet Muhammad and the subsequent caliphate.46

Stetkevych argues that these two narratives were parallel and isolated
streams that were rarely in conversation with one another: “the theological
pre-Mu ammadan age appears to be simultaneous with the heroic Jāhilīyah
age, but within Abbasid culture the two are never integrated nor do they af-
fect one another.”47
If poetry vectored the jāhiliyyah’s heroic tradition, the Qur ān and the
adīth became the vehicles for the theological tradition that inscribed moral
purity in the Prophet and the a āba.48 These parallel “tracks,” if you will,
were irreconcilable, but in their mutual irreconcilability they reveal to just
what an extent the jāhiliyya was a construction, becoming whatever later
thinkers wanted it to be. This is nicely embodied in the lines of Abū Tammām
(d. 231/845):

The sword informs more truly than the book,

Its edge divides earnestness from jest.
The whit of the blade, not the black on the page,
Its back dispels uncertainty and doubt.
And knowledge lies in the bright spears, gleaming
Between two armies, not in the seven gleaming stars.49

Here, the poet boldly declares that it is the man of action, and not the reli-
gious scholar or astrologer, that is the true carrier of manly virtue. The hero is
more important in this worldview than the believer.50
Though Suzanne P. Stetkevych imagines these two jāhiliyyahs as diamet-
rically opposed to one another, I wish in the remaining part of this section to
suggest that they, once again, represent but two sides of the same phenome-
nological coin. Whether imagined as the period of “ignorance” or as that of
heroic courage, both facilitated and further contributed to an understanding
of the present. Ultimately, of course, it is the latter understanding—that of
the present—that takes precedence over anything we might describe as an
accurate “historical” account. The perceived asymmetry between pre- and
post-Islam—and the process is the same regardless of whether it is defined
in terms of religiosity or masculinity—is what ultimately enabled subsequent
Arab Muslims to locate and collectively define themselves and, in the pro-
cess, all those increasingly defined as non-Muslims or non-Arabs.
Despite the existence of these two diametrically opposed jāhiliyyahs, the
fact remains that they are both projections necessary for the articulation
80 Late Antique Fantasies

of Arabness and of Islam. Without such a space there would be no way to

make claims for just what Islam was or indeed who an Arab was. If previous
chapters used other categories to show how the early Muslim community
thought about others, the concept of the jāhiliyya now permitted a fluid land-
scape upon which to place them and to develop a set of imagined relations
between them. Now mu minūn, mashrikūn, kāfirūn, unafā , and muslimūn,
among others, could interact with one another, no matter how imaginatively,
with an eye toward making sense of ever-changing presents.
In the final analysis, this positive reading of jāhiliyya permitted the space
for the emerging Arab “nation” to become Muslims. This subsequent Muslim
creation of Arabs was a pan-cultural phenomenon that permitted much-
needed self-definition in the face of the community’s interaction with not
only other faith communities in the late antique Middle East51 but also with
non-Arab Muslims, an increasingly important and expanding category. If
this new category or term of reference permitted a sharp break from all that
was not Islam on the one hand, it facilitated a much-needed ethnogenesis on
the other.52

Jāhiliyya: Muslim Construction of an (Ideal) Past

The jāhiliyya, as we have seen, gave the early Muslim community the means
to locate themselves and those they encountered within an idealized space.
Upon its grid could be mapped—safely, conveniently, and in an essential-
ized fashion—Christians, Jews, and all others with whom the early Muslims
came into contact. The jāhiliyya allowed Arabs/Muslims to construct their
own idealized religious precursors—authentic, heroic, speaking and under-
standing the pure language of the Qur ān, and on the verge of entering world
history—who interacted with people who rejected Muhammad, his message,
and ultimately the community of believers.
In so doing, the jāhiliyya allowed Muslims to establish a genealogy for
themselves, something that was necessary since those doing the construc-
tion of this genealogy were townsmen who, as Hoyland puts it, were “strong
on religion, but short on identity.”53 As the followers of Muhammad entered
regions with lengthy and venerable religious traditions, they needed their
own religious history and ethnic identity. They seem to have picked up on
the idea—around at least since the time of the Jewish historian Josephus
(ca. 37–100 CE)—that the Arabs were descendants of Ishmael.54 This idea
 Past Perfect 81

enabled the early Muslims to fashion a religious pedigree for themselves. In

terms of identity, these early Muslims turned to the nomadic Arabs, “who
were short on religion, but strong on identity.” The result was, as Webb has
articulated so well, the creation of a pan-Arab identity. The creation of a
common history, a common identity, and a common destiny that developed
around the Arabic language aided the process of ethnogenesis. As Arabs
increasingly thought of themselves as a distinct “nation,” they could retain
a sense of their own distinctiveness and purpose in their encounters with
other groups.
Just as importantly, however, the jāhiliyya also facilitated the establish-
ment of a genealogy for others. The Muslim construction of a Christian past
allowed later writers to explain away the positive references to Christians
in the Qur ān. As we shall see in chapter 5, imagined “pure” Christians, like
Waraqa and Ba īra, were said to have existed within the ijāz at the time just
prior to Muhammad’s prophetic career. They were the ones who acknowl-
edged Muhammad’s prophecy and who, not unlike the unafā , secretly pre-
served a pure and untampered version of Christianity that was quantitatively
and qualitatively different from that produced by the churches of the Roman
and Persian Empires. The implication, of course, is that any true Christian
would have already converted to Islam, since true Christianity, like true
Judaism, prophesied Islam. Those Christians that the early Muslims encoun-
tered, in other words, could then be categorized as mushrikūn, who deserved
their subordinate status as a conquered population.55
The “Islam” of ninth-century Baghdad, as we have seen time and again,
was not the same as the “Islam” of seventh-century Arabia. Kāfirūn,
mushrikūn, Jews, Christians, and others that the first Muslims encountered
would have been quantitatively and qualitatively different from the individ-
uals and/or groups that they subsequently encountered in cosmopolitan and
multicultural centers. Yet because the categories originated in former times,
they could not be rejected out of hand. Instead, they provided the means to
think about others in the light of changing circumstances. Those Jews and
Christians who did not join the umma could now be transformed into and
described using qu rānic terms such as kāfirūn and mushrikūn that originally
had much different meanings. The use of such terms further facilitated the
growing community’s sense of spiritual superiority, something that could co-
incide with their obvious political superiority. The jāhiliyyah provided the
Arabs with a genealogy that showed them in possession of a pedigree no less
grandiose or glamorous than those they now ruled over.
82 Late Antique Fantasies

Ibn Qutayba and Arab Superiority

We witness this further in Ibn Qutayba’s (d. 276/889) polemical treatise Fa l

al- Arab wa l-tanbīh alā ulūmihā. The chief aim of this work, one of the most
explicit attempts to create a sense of Arab identity, is to extol the virtues of the
Arabs by demonstrating their superiority to all other peoples and/or groups.
The need to demonstrate superiority, perhaps not surprisingly, is connected
to a sense of inferiority, especially when compared to the achievements of
others. The construction of Arab identity, among Abbāsid-era poets and
among the likes of Ibn Qutayba, is thus predicated on the desire to overlay a
set of shared ideals and values onto what was little more than a loose amphic-
tyony of groups cohabiting within the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. The
creation of a strong and ideal past, in other words, aids in the construction of
a strong present and future.
This is in keeping with other changes taking place within the umma in this
period. Whereas the earliest community, in the words of Savant and Webb,
regarded themselves as a broad-based faith community, in subsequent centu-
ries “Muslim conquerors sought to maintain their distinctiveness from sub-
ject populations by developing strategies to segregate themselves, including
the creation of a novel sense of belonging to an ‘Arab’ community.”56 It is
within this context that Ibn Qutayba’s Fa l al- Arab wa l-tanbīh alā ulūmihā
must be situated. In this, he is the heir to a set of writings by a group of pre-
vious scholars—including the aforementioned Ibn al-Kalbī (d. 204/819) and
the likes of Abū Ubaydah (d. 210/825)—who had sought to establish a sense
of pre-Islamic Arab identity as part of an attempt to create a myth of Arab
origins.57 Drawing on their writings, Ibn Qutayba sought to re-enforce and
re-emphasize a sense of Arab communal belonging.
With the expansion of the umma to include many non-Arabs, Arabs
needed more than just religion to set them apart. It was perhaps inevitable
that a new feature—ethnicity, to be sure a modern expression—had to be
created. Like jāhiliyya to which it was intimately related, Arab identity was
based on a manufactured past and the subsequent projection of a set of imag-
ined virtues onto it.58 Islam and (pre-Islamic) Arabia now comingled and
pivoted around the importance of Arabness and the Arabic language. The
Qur ān now became the perfect text written in Arabic, now conceived of as
the perfect language, and Muhammad as the perfect prophet, someone again
defined largely by his Arabness. Here we see, pace S. P. Stetkevych’s claim, the
intersection of the two types of jāhiliyya, religious and manly.
 Past Perfect 83

Arabic now formed the catalyst for social formation, that which was the
constituent part in the definition of “the Arabs,” a group imagined to the ex-
clusion of other social groups. Those who spoke Arabic now became part of
a community that was increasingly defined by the purity and pristineness of
its language.59 Arabic, the product of pre-Islam, now became the hallmark
of Islam and Muslims. In this way jāhiliyya took on a positive valence since
it functioned as the vehicle that led directly and inevitably into Islam. Arabic
and those who spoke it, however, could certainly be expanded—and again
showing the artificiality of the category—in such a manner that could now
include any Arabic-speaking Muslim.60
Within this context of language and its relationship to ethnogenesis, Ibn
Qutuyba was particularly critical of the Shu ūbiyya.61 Though derived from
the qur ānic word for “nation” or “people,”62 in the early Muslim period the
term came to refer to those non-Arab Muslims, particularly Persians, crit-
ical of the privileged status that Arabs enjoyed within the umma.63 Although
in theory it was a movement devoted to the promotion of equality between
Arabs and non-Arabs, the latter not infrequently insulted the former for their
perceived backwardness and lack of social graces.64 When non-Arabs had
achieved the heights of civilization, so the argument went, the Arabs were
little more than uncultured Bedouin. Though later tradition would ascribe
to the Shu ūbiyya a distinctly Persian flavor, it seems that for Ibn Qutayba
the term referred to anyone critical of his self-styled “Arabness.” If, as Sarah
Bowen Savant argues, the category Shu ūbiyya is underdetermined here on
account of the fact that we possess the names of very few Shu ūbīs, it is also
significant that the fear of the Shu ūbī—to wit, the person who threatened the
umma from within—contributed, once again, to a sense of a positive Arab
identity.
Though the term Shu ūbiyya remains relatively nonspecific in his text, Ibn
Qutayba holds them ultimately responsible for having a deep-seated ani-
mosity toward the Arabs, secretly if not overtly despising them. Such indi-
viduals, according to him,

deride the Arabs with plain hatred, as they go to great efforts to revile
them, draw attention to their vices, and distort accounts of their virtues
[ta rīf al-kalim fī manāqbihum]. They do this in the Arabs’ very own lan-
guage, owe whatever it is that lets them put on airs and graces to the Arabs’
accomplishments, and wage their war with the Arabs’ own learning. If they
learn anything good about the Arabs, they conceal it. If it becomes public
84 Late Antique Fantasies

knowledge, they belittle it. If it is susceptible of interpretation, they give

it the most reprehensible one they can devise. If they hear something bad
about the Arabs, they spread it far and wide. If what they hear is not actually
bad, they avoid it like the plague. And if they cannot find anything bad, they
make it up.65

Such negative assessments, Ibn Qutayba reasons, stem from the petty
jealousies found among lower classes on the one hand, and a false sense of
nobility among higher ones on the other. These groups, according to him,
use the Arabs as a foil to aggrandize themselves and their achievements.
However, it is clear that Ibn Qutayba, so able to recognize this pattern in
those he here criticizes, performs the exact same exercise, only now using
non-Arabs as his foil to articulate Arabness and, by extension, Islam. Non-
Arabs allow him to demonstrate the superiority of the Arabs (fa l al- arab)
and, in the process, defend their social prestige from those who seek to un-
dermine it. All of the negative personality and linguistic traits—and in his
mind they are most certainly interconnected—that non-Arabs possess now
become the polar opposite or inverse of that which defines the Arabs.
Ibn Qutayba, however, does not leave his analysis on the level of linguistics
but also transfers it onto the register of religion. He can do this, of course, on
account of contemporaneous discussions of the purity of the Arabic mes-
sage associated with the Qur ān. A large part of the latter’s superiority was, as
we have already seen, imagined to have been based on the superiority of the
former. In the aforementioned quotation, for example, he employs the term
ta rīf, which was also a technical term to describe the “distortion” or “tam-
pering” that other monotheists performed on their religious scriptures.66
Just as later Muslims accused Jews and Christians of “tampering” with their
scriptures and the messages found therein, Ibn Qutayba here argues that such
groups do the same to the customs of the Arabs. Implicit in Ibn Qutayba’s
claim, then, is that non-Arabs “tamper” with or “distort” the good name of
the Arabs in the same manner that their previous coreligionists distorted
their own scriptures for their own ends. This triangulation of language, eth-
nicity, and religion again surfaces when Ibn Qutayba faults the Shu ūbiyya
for insulting Islam when they assert the “claim of a lineage to Isaac, son of
Abraham, and with their boast, aimed at the Arabs, that Isaac was born from
Sarah, a free woman, whereas Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, was born from
Hagar, a slave.”67
 Past Perfect 85

Since, according to Islamic tradition, Arabs are the direct descendants

of Abraham through Ishmael, and—at least according to one tradition—it
was the two of them responsible for the establishment of the ka ba in Mecca,
charges that sought to undermine such a genealogy needed to be confronted
head-on.68 To correct the opinion that the matriarch of the Arabs was a slave,
Ibn Qutayba writes that, far from unclean,

God cleansed and purified Hagar of every impurity and filth, and fa-
vored her as a lawful spouse for Abraham, the chosen companion of God,
and as a mother to her pure offspring, Ishmael and Muhammad. So is it
even remotely acceptable for a Muslim, let alone an apostate, to call her
unclean? . . . Slave women have given birth to caliphs and to good and
pious men.

Here, Muhammad is presented as the prophet of the pure Arabic message

of an unadulterated and uncorrupted monotheism. His message is linguis-
tically—and, by extension, theologically—differentiated from all others on
account of its superiority. And this superiority is based on his relationship
to Hagar, mother of the Arabs. This is but the natural progression, as he now
shows us, of the jāhiliyya, a time wherein Arabs excelled in all the relevant
sciences while simultaneously awaiting a prophet to show them—or, per-
haps better, remind them of—their religious excellence. Ibn Qutayba thus
connects the superiority of Islam to the superiority of the pre-Islamic Arabs.
In the second part of the work, that titled al-tanbīh alā ulūmihā, Ibn
Qutayba extols the virtues of those fields, sciences, or disciplines wherein
one clearly witnesses the superiority of the pre-Islamic Arabs. One such area,
not surprisingly, was poetry. According to him, in the opening part of that
section:

There are two kinds of knowledge. One is Islamic, a product of the Muslim
religion and the Arabic language [al-dīn wa- l-lugha]. It includes jurispru-
dence, grammar, and the study of poetic themes [ma āni al-sh ir]. These
fields are particular to the Arabs. Non-Arabs can master them only by
learning and parroting; the Arabs alone possess the brilliance and the glory
of having developed them. The other is age-old knowledge, common to all
peoples, God has granted the Arabs a share of every field of which I am
aware, and in some they alone came to possess unrivaled knowledge.69
86 Late Antique Fantasies

After a discussion of the other various skills in which the pre-Islamic Arabs
excelled—such as astronomy (al-nujūm), soothsaying (al-kihāna), and ora-
tory (al-khu ab)—Ibn Qutayba turns his attention to a much fuller discus-
sion of poetry (al-sh ir). It is this skill, according to him, that sets the Arabs
apart. “No other nation,” according to him, “has ever equaled the Arabs’
meters, prosodies, and rhyme schemes.”70 Those of non-Arabs, by contrast,
lack these features and are instead defined by unstructured speech and prose
(mu laq min al-kalām wa-manshūr).71 He goes on to say that

poetry is the source of the Arabs’ learning, the basis of their wisdom, the
archive of their history, the repository of their battle lore. It is the wall
built to protect the memory of their glories, the moats that safeguard their
laurels. It is the truthful witness on the day of crisis, the irrefutable proof in
disputes. He who has no decisive proof to support his claims of nobility, or
his claims about his ancestors’ glory and praiseworthy deeds, will find that
his efforts are in vain, even if his glorious deeds are famous. Their memory
will be effaced over time, even if they are momentous. But he who has his
merits committed to rhyming verse and bound in meter, and gives them
renown through a choice verse, a memorable maxim, or a subtle notion will
immortalize them for all time.72

In this passage, Ibn Qutayba connects the pre-Islamic period to linguistic

perfection and the poetic quest for immortality. A people can only become
immortal by means of poetic panegyric. Whereas other peoples at this time
may have been in the possession of other virtues, they lacked a fundamental
medium to conceptualize those virtues for posterity. Arabic poetry, on the
other hand, is the vehicle responsible for vectoring the Arabs and their virtues
into immortality. This was something that would be continued by the literary
beauty of the qur ānic message. Jews, Christians, “easterners” or “Persians”
(al- ajam), and others thus function, for Ibn Qutayba as they do for others,
as a foil by which to carve out space for the fluid, yet increasingly solidifying,
category “Arabs.” Whereas the former groups lacked viable languages to se-
cure their immortality, the latter possess both by virtue of their language.
This is the opposite of those treatments, discussed earlier, that posit a sharp
distinction between jāhiliyya and Islam. For Ibn Qutayba, on the contrary, it
is through poetry that “God enabled groups to be exalted before and after
Islam.”73 Arabic was not closed to other groups, however. The language of
the Arabs, and especially its poetry, was what permitted these others to share
 Past Perfect 87

in the privilege of the Arabs. Unlike them, however, Ibn Qutayba informs us
that poetry and wisdom “are the sciences of the Arabs. . . . [A]ll this know-
ledge belongs to them and them alone. No one contests them for it, nor does
any people claim that the Arabs took any of it from them.”74 Implicit in such
a statement is that other peoples have much to learn from the Arabs, but not
vice versa.
Ibn Qutayba, from the vantage point of hindsight, transforms the ancient
Arabs into a people or an “ethnos” distinct from other peoples or ethnoi,
whether on the Arabian Peninsula prior to Muhammad or in subsequent
generations. This retroactive ethnogenesis, to use Webb’s term, succeeded
in drawing sharp lines between relatively indistinct social groups.75 In Ibn
Qutayba’s work, then, we see a further layer added to the accumulating defi-
nition of “Arabness,” which could then be subsequently projected back onto a
distant past imagined to be the quintessence of human civilization. It was the
Arabian desert, in other words, and not the urban environment of places like
Baghdad, that served as the birthplace of an authentic Islam, untouched and
untrammeled by other cultures or groups.

The Nobility (sharaf) and Original Monotheism

of al-Jāhiliyya

The idea of creating pre-Muslim Muslims or, what Webb calls, “pseudo-mon-
otheistic Arabs before Muhammad” is witnessed in the likes of al-Ya qūbī’s
(d. 284/898) Tārīkh, which stresses pre-Islamic virtues, such as nobility
(sharīf),76 generosity (karīm),77 and “forebearing” ( alīm, the opposite of
jāhil).78 We also witness this in the likes of al-Balādhurī’s (d. 279/892) Ansāb
al-ashrāf (“Genealogies of the Nobles”), another text that recounts the many
virtues of noble Arab families in the pre-Islamic period. Such texts thus form
part of a larger genre that characterizes the sharaf, or nobility, of pre-Islamic
Arabs, especially those associated with the subsequent reception of Islam.79
These texts reveal to just what an extent a sense of “Arabness” could be artic-
ulated in a manner that was distinct from the identities of rival groups, espe-
cially that of other monotheists, which were also being actively constructed
at the same time.
Such themes are subsequently picked up in Al- Iqd al-farīd (“The Unique
Necklace”) by Ibn Abd Rabbih (d. 328/940). An adīb from al-Andalus, he is
best known as the official panegyrist of the Umayyad Emirate in Cordoba.80
88 Late Antique Fantasies

His goal in the work, as he informs the reader in the opening section, is
to compile valuable material of the past: “I have compiled this work and
selected its jewels [jawāhir] from the choice gems of literature and the best
picks of eloquence.”81 Like the wise of previous generations, he seeks to bring
the past to life with the aim of celebrating its accomplishments in the pre-
sent: “every one of them [i.e., wise men] has given his utmost and done his
best to summarize the beautiful ideas of the ancients and to select the gems
of the sayings of past generations [fī-ikhti ār badī ma ānī al-mutaqaddimīn
waikhtiyār jawāhirih]. . . . [T]hey have done this so profusely that their sum-
maries have needed summarization, and their selections have needed further
excerpting.”82
With such statements, Ibn Abd Rabbih seeks to bring to open light the
cumulative wisdom of Arab literary traditions. The title, “The Unique
Necklace,” is both aesthetic and structural. The author presents this know-
ledge as a necklace of twenty-five precious pearls, with each book therein
corresponding to the name of a distinct gem or pearl. As Isabel Toral-Niehoff
notes, we should not see the Iqd al-farīd as a unique text, but as a conduit
into the entire world of the adab tradition. Within this context, many of the
narrative units (akhbār) that appear in this work also appear, to use again her
language, “in other adab collections and in historical compilations (though
often with slight variations), so that we should read them not only in the con-
text of Iqd al-farīd, but also within the inter-textual web of cognate texts.”83
When we turn our attention to “The Book of the Unique Jewel on
Genealogy and Virtues of the Arabs” (Kitāb al-yatīma fī l-nasab wa-fa ā il
al- arab), we again witness the importance of lineage—whether real or imag-
ined is unimportant—between the pre-Islamic Arabs and contemporaneous
Muslims. “Lineage,” he writes, “is the means of mutual acquaintance and the
instrument of interconnection; for through it, close blood relations harbor
mutual affection and proximate bonds are preserved.”84 With this state-
ment, he then goes on to list the virtuous duties that were prominent in the
jāhiliyya:

These are the honorable duties of the jāhiliyya: providing drink to pilgrims
[al-siqāya], ensuring proper speech in holy places [al- imāra], carrying
the flag of war [al- uqāb], helping lost pilgrims [al-rifāda], guarding holy
places [al-sidāna], door-keeping at holy places [al- ijāba], administering
the tribal council [al-nadwa], tying the tribal standard [al-liwā ], being
consulted [al-mashūra], adjudicating indemnities [al-ashnāq], being
 Past Perfect 89

responsible for the tribal war tent [al-qubba], leading the cavalry in war
[al-a inna], intervening between rival groups [al-sifāra], administering lot-
casting arrows [al-aysār], being an arbiter [al- ukūma], being responsible
for the funds dedicated to tribal idols [al-awwāl al-mu ajjara].85

As we have seen previously, it is worth noting how, unlike other thinkers

who describe the jāhiliyya in the most unvirtuous terms, Ibn Abd Rabbih
instead chooses to emphasize the positive aspects of pre-Islam. In the
traditions that he relays, even the maintenance of tribal idols is regarded as a
virtuous activity. Once Muhammad and Islam came on the scene, he informs
us, many of these virtues simply carried over into the new tradition: “Any
honor in the jāhiliyya that came down to Islam was continued. Thus, giving
drink to pilgrims, enforcing proper speech in the Holy Mosque and leading
those called to arms [ ulwān al-nafr] were duties in the hands of the Banū
Hāshim.”86
With these comments, Ibn Abd Rabbih draws a middle line between
imagining the jāhiliyya as either all good or all bad. Instead, for him, it was a
period wherein the Arabs possessed a distinct set of virtues that, carried on
into the Islamic period, nonetheless distinguished the Arabs from all others.
While some mushrikūn might well embody some of these virtues, however,
it was Muhammad and the rise of Islam that gave them a different valence.

* * *
This chapter has focused on the jāhiliyya as a vital component of Islam’s crea-
tion. Just as belief only makes sense in light of its opposite, unbelief, and just
as orthodoxy could not exist without heterodoxy, Islam too needed its an-
tithesis. Jāhiliyya fit the bill perfectly for such a role, serving as the grandiose
backdrop from which Islam emerged and against which it could ultimately
be plotted. Certainly, as other chapters have shown, other groups were used
for this process, but the jāhiliyya provided the mise-en-scène upon which all
these religious others could assume the parts that had been assigned to them
by the later Islamic narrative. Like so much else, however, it proved to be an
anxious inheritance. The jāhiliyya had to represent the opposite of Islam. It
was signified by its spiritual malaise, its wanton violence, its lack of morality,
and so on. Yet, at the same time, the jāhiliyya could not be all bad since it was,
after all, the environment that produced Muhammad, his revelation, and the
earliest Muslims. To resolve such ambiguity, much energy was expended in
trying to reconcile these competing features. This tended to be done, as I tried
90 Late Antique Fantasies

to show here, in emphasizing the triangulation between Islam, its language,

and the Arab “nation.” Such a triangulation allowed the framers of Islam to
stress, once again, the superiority of their religion, their language, and their
genealogy over all others.
The previous chapters, the sum and substance of part I, have presented
some of the manifold ways whereby later framers imagined the earliest pe-
riod. The second part now turns to more discrete religious communities of
later periods. Though just as much the end products of imaginative work, we
will now see how orthodoxy was further shaped using the textual bodies of
these religious others.
 PART II
SU B SE QU E NT C ON ST RUC T ION S
 4
Good Jew, Bad Jew

Act differently from the Jews, for they do not pray in their sandals or
their shoes.1

The people of the Scripture [i.e., Jews] used to recite the Torah in
Hebrew and they used to explain it in Arabic to the Muslims. On that
God’s Messenger said, “Do not believe the people of the Scripture or
disbelieve them, but say, ‘We believe in Allah and what is revealed to
us’ ” (Q 2/136).2

The actual Jewish communities that Muhammad would have encountered

on the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with are very difficult, if not im-
possible, to reconstruct.3 Despite the proximity of the region to Palestine,
both at the time of the Second Temple period and to centers of Jewish life and
learning there after its destruction, these Arabian Jews remain an enigma,4
and basic and fundamental questions remain.5 Who, for example, where
they?6 Where did they come from? And, perhaps most importantly, what
kind of Judaism did they believe in or practice?7 The Jewish communities on
the Arabian Peninsula thus pose a number of intractable problems. Rather
than start from the assumption that a stable and normative Judaism birthed
an unstable Islam, just as it was believed to have done with Christianity at
the other end of late antiquity,8 it is necessary to begin with the premise that
Judaism at this time and in this location was, by definition, non-normative
and certainly underdefined.9
Such historical questions, however, certainly did not bother subsequent
generations of Muslim thinkers, who largely continued to think with Jews as
a way to think about themselves. In all of these constructions Arabian Jews
are imagined as normative, rabbinic, and authentic. This is not so much
a historical problem as it is a theological and a literary one. At work was a
complicated dialectic: The early Jewish community with whom Muhammad

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0005
94 Subsequent Constructions

ostensibly interacted provided the paradigm for thinking about all future
Jewish-Muslim relations on the one hand, just as later Jewish communities
contributed to and helped give definition to the Jews recounted in the Qur ān
and the early Islamic literary tradition on the other. This circular process—
using later groups to expand upon earlier categories and then deploying these
early categories to understand later groups—was a common theme in the way
that early Islamic thinkers produced knowledge about religious others.
Previous chapters witnessed the creation and subsequent elaboration of a
set of autochthonous categories to define what was slowly emerging as cor-
rect belief. All of these categories took place, as just witnessed, within the
longue durée provided by the jāhiliyya. Jews and Christians, as this and the
following chapter will demonstrate, fit ambiguously within this pre-Islamic
ethos. While such groups believed in the oneness of God, the nature and
quality of their beliefs ostensibly made them different from unbelievers and
hypocrites. However, at the same time, the fact remained that they ultimately
chose not to join the community of believers as Muslims. Their intransi-
gence, then, meant that they potentially posed a bigger threat to Muslims on
account of their incorrect, partial, or otherwise corrupted monotheism.
To demonstrate this, the first two chapters of part II will focus on those
recognizable others that had been present—in some way, shape, or form—
from the very beginning of Islam. Whereas part I of this study, for the most
part, focused on the repercussions of a set of autochthonous terms gener-
ated by the Qur ān, the chapters that compose part II deal with specific re-
ligious others. Muslim thinkers, I argue, continued to need the categories
and ideas developed in the Qur ān to think about alterity and to develop
and build upon rubrics into which social and religious others could still be
located and their ideas and beliefs placed. For these others to be understood,
in other words, they continued to be mediated through the qur ānic text.
Even though real Jews were encountered, for example, they were ultimately
processed using categories that the Qur ān had developed. Such categories
reduced Jews to those who had originally received a message resembling that
of Islam but who, on account of their own devices and craftwork, went astray.
They not only changed their own religion, so the qur ānic narrative went, but
also convinced Christians to do the same. This is the script that the Qur ān
provided for the Jews, and in subsequent literature a set of highly stylized
Jews were made to mouth their lines.
Most of our Arabic sources, then, are less interested in historical Jews than
they are in literary ones. Such literature, to use the words of Wansbrough,
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 95

seeks to establish “the isolation of semiological space into which may be

inserted a selection of themes and symbols intended to recall the event of
revelation.”10 The Jew in the text, building upon his comments, is a meta-
phor for what the potential rejection of Muhammad’s message might look
like. These Jews, to continue with Wansbrough’s semiotic metaphor, function
as a placeholder that, while necessary for syntactic restraints, nevertheless
provides us with little or no semantic information. If Wansbrough is correct,
and I suspect that he is, “what we know of the seventh-century ijāz (the
area of Mecca, Medina, and environs) is the product of intense literary ac-
tivity, then that record has got to be interpreted in accordance with what we
know of literary criticism.”11
The result is that we must use these sources with caution. In what follows
in part II, I examine relevant literature—which includes historical annals,
prosopographical compendia, works of belles-lettres, and treatises of the-
ology and heresiography—as a series of mutually overlapping reflections that
tell us about how Muslim communities understood themselves and their so-
cial world. One of the primary means by which they went about this was by
taxonomizing religious others that they encountered.

The Trope of Jewish Deceit

It is a common theme within the history of religions that perceived

innovations or challenges to orthodoxy are presented as foreign contagions.
It is certainly not something that is unique to our Muslim sources. We fre-
quently see this trope in non-Muslim accounts. For example, Byzantine
sources often reduce iconoclastic tendencies to the influence of both Jewish
and Muslim converts.12 We also witness how non-Muslim accounts of the
origins of Islam imagine a Jewish influence. The Nestorian author of the
Syriac Apocalypse of Sergius Ba īrā, for example, describes Muhammad as
the student of Ba īrā, an Arab Christian ascetic briefly mentioned in the
previous chapter and who will play a larger role in the following one, but
who later fell under the negative influence of a Jew by the name of Ka b
al-A bār.13 According to the Apocalypse, “Ka b the Scribe—cursed be
his memory—passed on [faulty information] to the Ishmaelites. He con-
founded and corrupted everything that Sergius [i.e., Ba īrā] had written
originally. For the sons of Ishmael were uncivilized pagans, like horses
without a bridle.”14
96 Subsequent Constructions

In another passage Ka b is the one held to be responsible for corrupting the

Qur ān, which the Apocalypse presents as given to Muhammad from Ba īrā.
We read that

after the death of Sergius, Ka b the Scribe rose up and he changed the
writings of Sergius Ba īrā and he handed down another teaching to them.
And he put in it confusion, corruption, superstitions, ridiculous and arbi-
trary things, circumcision, ablution, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth,” and “a killing for a killing.” And divorce, and that when a woman is
repudiated, if another man does not take her, he cannot return to her. . . .
Not the slightest fear of God was to be found in it, because all that Sergius
had handed down to them had been changed by Ka b the Jew.15

I shall discuss Ka b al-A bār, a central Jewish convert to Islam, later, showing
how the early Muslim community regarded him more positively and as an
important conduit between the ancient lore of the Jews and the new mes-
sage of Muhammad. It is worth mentioning in the present context, however,
that Christian polemicists portray him as a deceitful character who encour-
aged the early Muslim community to stray from Christianity. It is also worth
mentioning how this early polemical literature invokes the motif of ta rīf, or
“tampering,” with scriptures, with now Muslims guilty as charged. Muslim
thinkers, it will be recalled, used this trope to show how and why the qur ānic
message differed from the scriptures of the Jews and Christians. Whereas
Muslim thinkers argued that both of these earlier monotheistic communi-
ties had corrupted their messages by changing them to suit their own needs
and for their own ends, here the authors of the Apocalypse invoke the same
charges against Muslims, and, just like the early Muslim thinkers, they put
the blame squarely on the shoulders of “the Jews.”
Within this context it is perhaps worth mentioning that this story also
circulates in Jewish sources,16 only now “the Jews” who join Muhammad are
portrayed as “misguided.” This takes its most popular form in the tale of the
ten wise Jews who converted to Islam to protect the Jewish people, and who
were believed to be responsible for writing the Qur ān. In the Christian ac-
count of Theophanes (d. 818), a Byzantine chronicler, we read:

At the beginning of his advent the misguided Jews thought he was the
Messiah who is awaited by them, so that some of their leaders joined him
and accepted his religion while forsaking that of Moses who saw God.
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 97

Those who did so were ten in number and they remained with him until his
first sacrifice. But when they saw him eating camel meat, they realized he
was not the one they thought him to be and were at a loss what to do. Being
afraid to abjure his religion, these wretched men taught him illicit things
directed against us Christians and remained with him.17

Theophanes here kills two birds with one stone, as it were. He discredits
the lack of originality in Islam by reducing it to a Jewish conspiracy, both of
which are subsequently directed against the true message of Christianity. In
all of these accounts, whether of the Muslim or Christian variety, Jews have to
be discredited. As the perceived harbingers of monotheism, it is not enough
to ignore them; rather, their errors must be put on full display so that the new
religion or movement can be clearly delineated therefrom and presented as
the religion that Judaism could have been. Within this context, of especial
concern for new religious traditions is the trope of the “crypto-Jew,” to wit,
the Jew who converts to the new religion but is believed to retain his or her
old traditions in secret.18 Such an individual is, of course, the ultimate threat.
He or she ostensibly looks and acts like others but, by virtue of that simili-
tude, threatens the community from within.

“Jews” and the Need for Differentiation

in Subsequent Literature

If the Qur ān was initially ambiguous in its treatment of the Jews, its later
verses tend to be rather consistent in its negative descriptions of them.
Subsequent literature expands upon the latter. We now begin to see qur ānic
Jews fleshed out and given greater definition, with their initial traits often
amplified in the process. Earlier themes of perfidy and betrayal are now nar-
ratively expanded, and in such a manner that they take on the role of essen-
tial character traits. The early Sīra literature, as witnessed in chapter 2, for
example, portrays the Jews as the villains from whom the young prophet
must be protected. Ibn Hishām picks up on the theme of duplicity when he
tells us that

the Jewish rabbis [of Medina] showed hostility to the apostle in envy, ha-
tred, and malice, because God had chosen His apostle from the Arabs. They
were joined by men from al-Aus and al-Khazraj who had obstinately clung
98 Subsequent Constructions

to their heathen religion. They were hypocrites [munāfiqūn], clinging to

the polytheism of their fathers denying the resurrection; yet when Islam
appeared and their people flocked to it they were compelled to pretend to
accept it to save their lives. But in secret they were hypocrites [munāfiqūn]
whose inclination was towards the Jews because they considered the apostle
a liar and strove against Islam.19

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons, First, we see how the
Jews are now neatly, too neatly, differentiated from Muslims. Whereas in
chapter 2 we witnessed how Jews, as part of the Constitution of Medina, were
presumably seen as an intimate part of the fledgling community in Medina,
here their presence is portrayed in distinctly negative terms. Second, and
relatedly, Jews and unbelievers are grouped together in their denial of Jesus’s
resurrection. It would seem that followers of Muhammad and Christians are
imagined on one side of an ontic divide, with Jews and unbelievers occu-
pying the other as munāfiqūn. Jews, then, threaten both Christians and
Muslims. Third, we encounter Jews as those who encourage a duplicitous re-
lationship to the new message. Not unlike Abdallāh ibn Saba , Islam’s arch
heretic whom we shall encounter shortly, Jews actively encourage “heathens”
to pretend to be believers externally, all the while practicing their own reli-
gion internally.
Ibn Hishām continues the previous passage by explaining how the Jews
used to tease the Prophet:

It was the Jewish rabbis who used to annoy the apostle with questions and
introduce confusion, so as to confound truth with falsity. The Qur ān used
to come down in reference to these questions of theirs, though some of the
questions about what was allowed and forbidden came from the Muslims
themselves. . . . These were the Jewish rabbis, the rancorous opponents of
the apostle and his companions, the men who asked questions, and stirred
up trouble against Islam to try to extinguish it.20

Jews are here presented as seeking to sow discord in the young com-
munity. They function as tricksters who desire to undermine the beliefs of
others.21 They ask questions, with nefarious intentions, of Muhammad so
that he will supply wrong answers, thereby making a mockery of his message.
These Jews, faceless and often nameless, function as metonyms for all Jews,
seeking to undermine the fledgling community in the same manner that they
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 99

were accused of undermining Christianity. This does not mean that Muslims
envisioned Christians and Christianity as their natural allies. Indeed, as we
shall witness in the following chapter, the young Muslim community also
sought to distance itself from them, but in different ways.
Ibn Hishām further remarks on the perfidy of “the Jews” when he recounts
the story of adulterers whom Muhammad ruled had to be stoned on account
of their transgression. When a Jew disagrees with Muhammad’s sentence,
Ibn Hishām relates the following story:

So God sent down concerning them: “O apostle, let not those who vie with
one another in unbelief sadden thee, those who say with their mouths,
We believe, but their hearts do not believe, those Jews who listen to lies,
listening for other people who do not come to thee,” i.e., those who sent
others and stayed behind themselves and gave them order to change the
judgement from its context. Then He said, “they change words from their
places.”22

Ibn Hishām here describes the Jews as unwilling to believe their own
scriptures. If they do not like a ruling, he intimates, they change it to suit
their need. Indeed, after Muhammad had ordered the couple to be stoned,
the Prophet asked for a Torah to justify his ruling:

A rabbi sat there reading it having put his hand over the verse of stoning.
Abdallāh b. Salām struck the rabbi’s hand away, saying, “This, O prophet
of God, is the verse of stoning which he refuses to read to you.” The apostle
said, “Woe to you Jews! What has induced you to abandon the judgement of
God which you hold in your hands?”23

If Jews are the epitome of duplicitousness and malfeasance, there must,

by necessity, be “good” Jews who show their coreligionists the error of their
ways. Here Abdallāh b. Salām, a Jewish convert to Islam whom I shall ex-
amine in greater detail shortly, exposes the corruption of his erstwhile com-
munity. In a subsequent section, Ibn Hishām holds the Jews responsible for
forming a party against Muhammad in Medina and inviting the Quraysh
of Mecca to join them. The latter asks the Jews, “You, O Jews, are the first
people of the Book [ahl al-kitāb] and know the nature of our dispute with
Muhammad. Is our religion best or is his?” The Jews replied that “certainly
[your] religion was better than his and [you] have a better claim to be right.”24
100 Subsequent Constructions

The Jews, once again, are presented as taking the side of Muhammad’s ene-
mies, and furthermore actively instigating them to fight against the Prophet.
In this, they function as a foil to the piety of the true community of believers.
This juxtaposition is brought out further in the adīth literature. I mentioned
earlier the problems of dating this literature but again use it here as a window
onto the early community’s relationship to other religious traditions, whether
actual or imagined. Numerous adīths attributed to the Prophet, for example,
seem concerned that Muslims do not imitate the practices and beliefs of Jews
and Christians. “He who imitates a people,” according to the report that opens
this chapter, “is one of them.”25 Or, “he who imitates others does not belong to
us, do not imitate Jews and Christians.”26 Working on the assumption that such
adīths exist precisely because such activities were going on, we can read such
statements as attempts on the part of the framers of the early community to
draw further lines between it and more entrenched communities with whom
they were increasingly in contact and in competition.27 Indeed, as Rubin notes,
cognate traditions also circulated that warned Muslims who engaged in such
practices that they risked becoming apes or pigs in the hereafter.28
This negative portrayal of Jews, I maintain, is associated with the need on
the part of the early Muslim community to differentiate itself from them and
to chart its own destiny by not falling back on old paradigms and narratives.
Yet, such paradigms and narratives were paradoxically needed to legitimate
the new message. To engage in this process of negation and differentiation,
the community first had to show just when, where, why, and how Jews went
astray. In apparent response to claims that early Muslims were consulting Jews
and Christians about their scriptures, Ibn Abbās is reported to have said,
“You ask the People of the Book about their books, while you have with you
the book of God. You should use [your own] as the closest of the scriptures
when it comes to knowledge of God, one wherein imperfection has not been
mixed.”29 Though interesting, the Prophet was also reported to have been
asked, “O Apostle of God, are we not to narrate [stories] concerning the chil-
dren of Israel?,” to which Muhammad responded, “Narrate, there is not sin.”30
We also see this anxiety in those adīths that target generic Jewish
practices, thereby further contributing toward an essentialized Judaism.
These can take the form of rather benign warnings against dressing like
Jews in prayer. Muslims are warned, for example, not to wear only one gar-
ment, as the Jews do, but instead “let he who has two garments dress himself
and then pray.”31 In like manner, it is reported that Ā ishah, Muhammad’s
third and youngest wife, “used to hate that one should keep his hands on
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 101

his flanks while praying. She said that the Jew used to do so.”32 Or, in the
name of Muhammad: “act differently from the Jews, for they do not pray in
their sandals or their shoes.”33 The early adīth literature also portrays Jews as
aware of how Muhammad and the early community sought to do the oppo-
site of them. We read, for example:

Among the Jews, when a woman menstruated, they did not dine with her,
nor did they live with them in their houses; so, the Companions of the
Apostle asked the Apostle, and Allah, the Exalted revealed: “And they ask
you about menstruation; say it is a pollution, so keep away from woman
during menstruation” (Q 2/222). The Messenger of Allah said: Do every-
thing except intercourse. The Jews heard of that and said: This man does not
want to leave anything we do without opposing us in it.34

Muslims are also told not to imitate the Jews who build “places of worship
at the graves of their prophets.”35 Likewise, Muhammad informs his followers
that “the Jews and the Christians do not dye (their hair), so oppose them.”36
Muslims, in other words, are encouraged to dress, practice, and greet one an-
other differently from the manner of other monotheists.37
Early Muslims existing on the Arabian Peninsula and spreading out in
the conquest period inhabited a shared social and intellectual space with
others. In that context, a wide variety of beliefs—monotheism, messianism,
and apocalypticism in response to growing political instability, prayer and
belief, and so on—were widely distributed. The subsequent articulation and
maintenance of border markers between what was “Islam” and what was
“Judaism” took considerable intellectual labor. This involved both demon-
izing—or, at the very least, showing the errors of—Jewish customs, belief,
and praxis, and thereby creating various taxonomies for them. The latter in-
volved trying to show what Jews did or at least were imagined to do, and what
Muslims should do in contrast. In the following adīth, we read:

The people of the Scripture [i.e., Jews] used to recite the Torah in Hebrew
and they used to explain it in Arabic to the Muslims. On that God’s
Messenger said, “Do not believe the people of the Scripture or disbelieve
them, but say, ‘We believe in Allah and what is revealed to us.’ ” (Q 2/136)38

Though it is impossible to know if Muhammad’s Jews actually knew

Hebrew, or if they even possessed a Torah,39 it is important to those who
102 Subsequent Constructions

collected the adīth that these Jews be rabbinic. This helped them to clarify,
again all too neatly, Islam from Judaism in the earliest period. Indeed, we see
this differentiation in the following:

The Messenger of God said: “Allah led those who came before us astray
from Friday. Saturday was for the Jews and Sunday was for the Christians.
And they will lag behind us until the Day of Resurrection. We are the last
of the people of this world but we will be the first to be judged among all of
creation.”40

Not only does this explain Muslim practice, but it also shows how such
practice is a restoration of what the other religions had before they went
astray. Muslim practice, like Islam more generally, is that which Judaism
wanted to be but, for a variety of reasons, was unable or incapable of attaining.
Alternatively, some adīths can take on a more cynical turn, such as when
Muhammad suggests that “The Jews are those who Allah is wrath with, and
the Christians have strayed.”41 Or in reference to Q 15/90 (“Just as we have
sent down [the Scripture] on those who are separated”), we read that the Jews
and Christians “believed in part of it and disbelieved in the other [amanū
bi-ba din wa-kafarū bi-ba din].”42 Regardless of the intensity of the charac-
terization, it is worth reiterating that that early Muslim community needed
to define itself. The only way to do this was to prevent Muslims—and, of
course, non-Muslims—from mistaking the new religion for its predecessors.
This was obviously being done or else there would not have been the constant
need to warn against such practices. In this regard, Judaism allowed Islam to
define itself while at the same time helping to legitimate it. These are recur-
ring themes and tropes that we shall witness throughout all of the remaining
chapters. This is certainly not anti-Semitism or even anti-Judaism, as some
contemporary neo-conservative pundits might opine, just the natural pro-
cess of seeking to differentiate one community from others with which it
shares basic filiations and commonalities.

Abdallāh ibn Saba : The Arch-Heretic

Perhaps the most famous Jew in all of Islamic literature is Abdallāh ibn
Saba , believed to have been a Jew from Yemen who converted to Islam after
the death of Muhmmad.43 His date of conversion is perhaps significant from
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 103

a literary point of view since it meant that he never actually met the Prophet
in person, implying that this might well be the reason for the lack of respect
for his message. At any rate, it is Ibn Saba , more than anyone, who is credited
with subverting the pristine unity (jamā a) of the early Muslim community.
Were it not for him and his deceitful actions, it is imagined that the originary
community would have remained unified and immune from subsequent sec-
tarianism. Whether or not he was an actual Jew—after all, what did an “actual
Jew” mean in the context of early seventh-century Arabia?44—of significance
to my argument is that the early and subsequent Muslim community imag-
ined him to be not just a Jew, but the Jew par excellence: one who embodied
all of the negative personality traits that the Qur ān had already ascribed
to Jews.
According to al- abarī, Ibn Saba

was a Jew from an ā , and his mother was a black woman. He converted
to Islam in the time of Uthmān, then roamed around about the lands of
the Muslims attempting to lead them into error. He began in the ijāz,
and then [worked] successively in Basra, Kufa, and Syria. He was unable
to work his will upon a single one of the Syrians, they drove him out and
he came to Egypt. He settled among the Egyptians, saying to them, among
other things, “How strange is it that some people claim that Jesus will re-
turn, while denying that Muhammad will return. Now Almighty God has
said, ‘He who ordained the Qur ān for thee will surely restore thee to a place
of return [Q 28/85].’ Now surely Muhammad is more worthy that Jesus to
return.”45

Ibn Saba is thus portrayed religiously as a Jew and racially as a non-Arab.

In this, he exemplifies the two negative traits that threaten the young com-
munity, and al- abarī certainly draws attention to these characteristics. The
latter also mentions how the followers of Ibn Saba , in both Iraq and Syria,
began to conspire with one another.46 Once converted, we learn that he
began to study theological speculation and that “through him the world fell
into chaos and baneful innovations arose.”47
By transforming Ibn Saba into a religiously orthodox Jew of later centu-
ries, subsequent commentators remove him successfully from the domains of
“Muslimness” and “Arabness”—two categories, as witnessed previously, that
were slowly coming into existence at roughly the same time to define the new
religion. He thus stands before us stigmatized and fully discredited.48 As the
104 Subsequent Constructions

foil to the fledgling community, he threatens that community with subversion

and ultimate chaos. Here, Ibn Saba is among the first instantiations of the
tendency in Islamic sources to attribute subversive and extremist doctrines to
Jewish origin and malfeasance. Indeed, as Sean Anthony has shown, Ibn Saba
is presented in the earliest Islamic historiographical and heresiographical tra-
dition as the nemesis of the early community’s caliphs, those recognized as the
so-called rashidūn (“rightly guided”).49 He is made to be the first to recognize
Alī as the true successor to Muhammad, of ascribing esoteric knowledge to
him, and of cursing the three caliphs prior to him (i.e., Abū Bakr, Umar, and
Uthmān) as illegitimate.50 Such heretical behavior, signified as quintessen-
tially Jewish, is subsequently responsible for the creation of the Shī a, often
imagined as the arch-heresy within the Islamic tradition.51
It is also worth noting that even subsequent Imāmī or Shī ī sources in-
sist on maintaining the Jewishness of Ibn Saba rather than seek to deny the
attribution.52 This is because subsequent Shī ī ideologues would hold him
responsible for the introduction of ghulūw or “extremist” tendencies in the
veneration of Alī, something that the later Shī a discredited.53 Of course,
though, what was extremist was something that could only be decided after
the fact. According to that tradition, it was the followers of Ibn Saba who
denied Alī’s death and who instead argued for his messianic return. This ten-
dency toward veneration was something, again according to later sources,
that resulted from his Jewishness and his desire to fit Alī’s relationship to
Muhammad into a biblical framework of Joshua’s succession to Moses.54 The
sin of Ibn Saba , according to both Sunnī and later Shī ī sources, was his in-
troduction of Jewish ideas into the heart of Islam. These included, but were
certainly not limited to, the notion that, while still a Jew, he regarded Joshua
as the natural inheritor of Moses’s authority (wa iyya), just as he would sub-
sequently do to Alī and Muhammad once he became a Muslim.55 As a result,
to use Sean Anthony’s words, Ibn Saba is

nearly universally reviled as a noxious religiopath. He subsequently

becomes a historiographical obsession because he stands at the patho-
logical locus of Islam’s earliest sectarian moment. He is not merely Islam’s
first heretic, but also (in a more literary sense) its most nefarious—its
arch-heretic.56

One of the earliest treatments of Ibn Saba appears in the work of the
second/ninth-century Kūfan historian Sayf ibn Umar al-Tamīmī (d. ca. 180/
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 105

796), which has been examined in Anthony’s study.57 For Sayf, as indeed
for the later heresiographical tradition more generally, Ibn Saba is the one
responsible for the first fitna (“civil strife” or “sedition”) in Islam,58 which
witnessed the overthrow of the rashidūn caliphs and the establishment of the
Umayyad dynasty in Damascus.59
Within this larger context it was the assassination of the third caliph
Uthmān ibn Affān in 35/256 that inaugurated one of the first fractures in the
young community. This revealed, perhaps more than any event, the fragility
at the heart of the umma. On Sayf ’s reading it was Ibn Saba and his acolytes,
the Saba iyya, who are the ones responsible for it and for causing and subse-
quently exploiting the rifts within the fledging polity. They stand before the
community as strife and discord incarnate. According to a report by Sayf:

Not a year had passed from the rule of Uthmān when men from the
Quraysh appropriated properties in the garrison cities, and the people
attached themselves to them. They were steadfast in doing this for seven
years, while other groups desired that their leader should rule. Then Ibn
Sawdā [i.e., Ibn Saba ] converted to Islam and began to speculate in re-
ligious matters [aslama wa-takallama]. The world passed into chaos, and
by his hands harmful innovations [a dāth] arose. People then felt that
Uthmān’s years were too long.60

Here Ibn Saba is held up as the one responsible for the introduction of
innovations into Muslim belief and practice, which led directly to the subse-
quent problems that plagued Uthmān’s caliphate. These included, but were
certainly not limited to, his preaching of Muhammad’s imminent return.
Again, according to Sayf, Ibn Saba

would say, “What a marvel it is that some believe that Jesus will return while
disbelieving that Muhammad will return! God Almighty has said, ‘Indeed,
He who has ordained the Qur ān for you will bring you back to place of re-
turn [inna alladhi fara a alayka al-qur āna la-rādduka ilā ma ād] (Q 28/
85).’ For Muhammad is more deserving of returning than Jesus!” That was
accepted from [al-Saba ] [by his followers]. And he fabricated for them [the
doctrine of return; al-raj a], and they began to speculate over it.61

Here Ibn Saba is credited with trying to trick early believers into thinking
that Muhammad would return after his death. Just as the Jews had convinced
106 Subsequent Constructions

Jesus’s followers to worship him as God, the Jew Ibn Saba attempts to do
the same to the early Muslim community. Though the idea of the imminent
return of the Shī ī Imām is certainly well attested in later sources, I follow
Anthony here, who argues that by Muhammad’s raj a, Ibn Saba would seem
to mean his return from the dead (raj at al-amwāt).62
Even the Jew who becomes a Muslim is under suspicion. This naturally
builds on the suspicion that the qur ānic text has for Jews. “The Jew”—and,
by extension, “the Jews”—function as a contagion that has the potential to
unleash foreign elements into the heart of Islam. Since Islam is, by definition,
not-Judaism (or, by definition, not-Christianity), the articulation of Jewish
(or Christian) beliefs—whether true, false, or exaggerated—is necessary
for the health of Islam. The genre of heresiology, as we shall see even more
clearly in chapter 6, becomes a necessary component for both articulating
and maintaining orthodoxy.
Despite his desire to preach about Alī’s messianic return, the Imāmī
heresiographical tradition associated with Ibn Saba ascribes the latter’s ex-
ecution at the hands of the former. According to the tradition of al-Kishshī,
reported on the authority of Yūnus ibn Abd al-Ra mān:

Abdallāh ibn Saba made a claim to prophecy while asserting that the
Commander of the Faithful [i.e., Alī] is God. Word of this reached the
Commander of the Faithful, so he called for him and questioned him. [Ibn
Saba ] reaffirmed this and said, “Yes, you are he! It was cast into my heart
that you indeed are God, and I am your prophet.” The Commander of the
Faithful said to him, “Woe to you, for Satan mocks you! Turn away from
this, lest your mother be bereaved of you, and repent!” [Ibn Saba ] refused.
[ Alī] imprisoned him and urged him to repent for three days, but he did
not repent. Then Alī burned him alive with fire and said, “Satan led him
astray with false imaginings. He would come to him and cast such things
into his heart.”63

Not only is Ibn Saba guilty for his ghulāt practices (or, perhaps better,
what will be imagined as a ghulāt practice in retrospect), but also, according
to al-Kishshī, he takes on the mantle of prophecy for himself. Here he ima-
gines himself as the prophet whose task is to recognize the divinity of Alī. In
time the followers of Ibn Saba —the so-called Saba iyya—also became asso-
ciated with other ghulāt or extremist views concerning the fourth and last of
the rightly guided caliphs.
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 107

Ibn Saba thus stands before the later Islamic tradition as doubly vilified.
What would emerge as mainstream Sunnī Islam imagines him as the architect
of sedition. At the same time, however, what will emerge as Twelver Shī ism
takes him to be the one responsible for introducing all sorts of unsavory
beliefs and practices into the tradition—beliefs and practices, moreover, that
are believed to derive from Jewish sources, and that needed to be weeded out.
The figure of the perfidious Jew—or the perfidious Jewish convert—permits
both the ahl al-sunna and the Shī a to conveniently locate where, when, why,
and how theological errors entered their respective traditions. Ibn Saba as
the convert, the one who enters into Islam and ostensibly embraces it, is cer-
tainly more dangerous than the Jew on the margins.
Ibn Saba thus personifies perfidy. He can unleash (or undo)—whether as
a literary creation or a historical persona is irrelevant for my argument—that
which other internal forces cannot. As someone who came to the commu-
nity from without, he undermines it from within. He is convenient; he is a
stereotype; and most of all he contributes positively—by virtue of his nega-
tivity—to the early community’s sense of its self. Without him, without the
Jews, the umma would not be able to understand what was happening to it
and its place in the late antique Middle East. The Jews, in sum, are increas-
ingly necessary for the articulation not only for what Islam is not but also,
just as importantly, for what it is.

The Good Jew: Abdallāh b. Salām and Ka b al-A bār

If “the Jew” can be a villain needed to carve out space for proper belief, there
must also exist Jews who function in the opposite capacity. The “good” Jew is
also necessary because, again as a textual trope if not an actual historical in-
dividual, he symbolizes the conduit between the old revelation and the new.
If the “bad” Jew sought to undermine Muhammad’s message, the “good” Jew
legitimates it. The latter individual, familiar with ancient Jewish lore and
traditions, can be made to prophesy the coming of Muhammad as predicted,
for example, in the original and untampered version of the Torah. In the later
Islamic literary tradition, the “good” Jew also becomes the person who seeks
to protect the Prophet from the intrigues of his erstwhile coreligionists. These
“good” Jews are also multipurpose. They predict; they warn; and they protect.
In so doing, they become, like their doppelgängers, literary characters who
further aid in the articulation of the new message.
108 Subsequent Constructions

Wherever there is an intersection between Islam and another religion,

there always exists the potential for anxiety. The old can only be used when
it has either been fully denigrated or shown to be misunderstood by those
who produced it, and then reconstituted by those who seek to repurpose it.
Muslim thinkers, in other words, create their own pasts for other religions—
pasts that conform to their own supersessionist agendas. According to tra-
dition, Abdallāh b. Salām (d. 43/663) was born in Medina within the tribe
Banū Qaynuqā and originally had the name usayn.64 When he converted
to the new message—keeping in mind that there would very likely have been
very little to convert to during this early period—shortly after Muhammad’s
arrival in the town, Muhammad gave him the name Abdallāh, that is, the
“servant of God.”65 According to al- abarī, he was with Umar in Jerusalem
and supported Uthmān against the rebels. Also, according to him, when an-
tigovernment rebels were set to attack Uthmān in his home,

Abdallāh b. Salām came forth and stood at the door of the house, forbid-
ding them to kill [ Uthmān]. “O my people,” he said, “do not unsheathe
God’s sword against yourselves. By God, if you draw it you will not put it
back in its scabbard. Woe to you! Your government today is based on the
whip, and if you kill him it will rest only on the sword. Woe to you! Your city
is surrounded by God’s angels. By God, if you kill him they will surely for-
sake it.” “What is this to you, son of a Jewess?” they said and he withdrew.66

Abdallāh b. Salām here, as the voice of reason, functions as the prescient

one who issues a warning to the rebels that any violence committed against
the third caliph—and here the “good” Jew undoes what the “bad” Jew had
set in motion—will only reverberate throughout the generations. Such vi-
olence would lead, in other words, to a host of other problems revolving
around succession and inevitably draw in the larger community. However,
the rebels refuse to listen to his warnings because, at least in the words al-
abarī ascribes to them, he is the “son of a Jewess.”
According to the tradition preserved by al-Māliqī, Abdallāh b. Salām says
the following:

Do not do this! God has shielded you from the sword of discord ever since
he brought out our prophet, Muhammad, and you will remain so until you
kill your imām. If this happens, God will unleash the sword of the fitna on
you, and not hold it back until the reemergence of Jesus. . . . Your town has
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 109

been guarded by the angels, ever since the messenger of God settled in it, but
if you kill [ Uthmān], they will abandon you until the Day of Judgement.67

It is interesting how al-Māliqī’s account preserves the mention of Jesus and

shows how the early Muslim community imagined itself as caught up in a
larger Near Eastern drama of salvation. Such traditions, not unlike many of
the isrā īliyyāt, as witnessed in a previous chapter, gradually began to fall out
of favor in the later Islamic literary tradition.68
Regardless, the anxiety produced by the likes of Abdallāh b. Salām
means that, to some, he is the righteous non-Arab who could both predict
and accept the message of Muhammad. However, to his enemies, Abdallāh
b. Salām will always be a problem—a Jew who, despite his conversion, never-
theless remains a Jew and, by extension, a threat to the fledgling community.
In his description of Medina as “surrounded by Angels” and his warning of
the fate that met other rebellious cities, Tayeb El-Hibri sees in him a biblical
model of the rise and fall of nations.69 This has the advantage, as we have
seen, of linking Islam’s new history with the ancient history of the Israelites.
Figures such as Abdallāh b. Salām, I would suggest, provide the necessary
link between the two traditions that certain framers so desired.
Despite the criticisms offered up by the rebels recounted previously, the
later Islamic tradition finds tremendous praise for this Jewish convert. He
is, for example, a character who regularly appears in prophetic adīth as the
scholar of Jewish scripture and of Jewish learning par excellence and as an in-
dividual who is destined for paradise.70
Ka b al-A bār,71 a seventh-century Yemenite Jew who converted to Islam,
according to al- abarī, in the first year of Umar’s reign (13/634), plays a sim-
ilar role in the fledgling community.72 He thus follows, at least textually, in
the path set out by Abdallāh b. Salām, thereby representing a second-gener-
ation Jew who recognized the truth of Islam. According to the third/ninth-
century biographer Ibn Sa d, when asked why he waited until after the death
of the Prophet to convert, Ka b responded:

My father wrote out a book for me from the Torah and gave it to me. [My
father] said, “Act according to this.” Then he sealed the rest of his books and
took from me the right of a father from his son that I would not break the
seal. When the time came and I saw that Islam had emerged and I did not
see any harm in it, I said to myself, “Perhaps my father has concealed some
knowledge from me. I should read it.” I opened the seal and read it, and in it
110 Subsequent Constructions

I found the description of Muhammad and his community. So now I come

as a Muslim.73

Here Ka b, as the embodiment of both religious and filial piety, is described

as someone who was—unlike his former coreligionists—able to witness the
truth and validity of the new religion. Even his father, who had written a
book for him based on the Torah, predicted the coming of the new prophet.
Once again, Ka b serves as a link to the past.
The subsequent Islamic literary tradition remembers him as the oldest
authority on Judeo-Islamic traditions, or isrā īliyyāt.74 The latter, as
Wasserstrom argues, functioned as the primary means whereby the early
community understood pre-Islamic history.75 Relatedly, such stories also
became the primary means that provided these Muslims with the catego-
ries—many of which were Near Eastern and/or biblical—used to under-
stand themselves. Indeed, his last name is the plural of ibr, related to the
Hebrew aber, and is the technical designation for an alīm, or scholar.76 Like
Abdallāh b. Salām, Ka b functions as a “the good Jew,” someone who, as orig-
inally belonging to Judaism, can see and attest to the truth of Muhammad’s
message. Not only does he agree to join the new umma, but also he helps to
give it form by providing it with the ancient patina that it so needed.
Ka b is the wise person, knowledgeable in the Torah,77 and, as such,
someone who offers council to caliphs based on his ancient wisdom. When
Umar wants to begin his administrative survey of the burgeoning empire, he
asks Ka b for his advice. The latter asks the caliph:

“Where would you like to make a start, Commander of the Faithful?” Umar
replied, “Iraq.” Ka b said, “Do not do that. Evil and good both consist of ten
parts. But whereas the one part that is good lies in the East and nine in the
West, the one part that is evil lies in the West while the nine other evil parts
lie in the East. The devil and every severe disease are linked with Iraq.”78

This cryptic expression reveals Ka b as a figure who, based on his know-

ledge of Jewish lore, can see into the future. When Umar arrives in Jerusalem,
for example, Ka b informs him, “O Commander of the Faithful, five hundred
years ago a prophet predicted what you have done today.”79 At the same time,
however, Ka b is accused of introducing Jewish elements into the religion. Al-
abarī, for example, preserves a story wherein Umar chastises him when he
treats the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as holy.80 Later, it is Ka b who predicts
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 111

Umar’s death. And it is Ka b who predicts Mu āwiya’s succession just as he

predicted Umar’s.81 He thus becomes, according to El-Hibri, the person who
charts what would, in hindsight, be the “orthodox” path of successorship.82

Medieval Heresiographical Literature

The medieval Islamic heresiographical tradition provides yet another

window into how normative Islam envisaged minoritarian traditions. Many
of these texts, which Wasserstrom has dubbed a precursor to the modern
field of comparative religion,83 seek to understand other religions while si-
multaneously undermining their truth claims.84 Such an activity, of course,
also allowed them to better understand themselves. Wasserstrom also aptly
refers to the genre of heresiography as “the science of the errors of others.”85
We should remember, however, that heresiography was not simply a theo-
retical enterprise, but an eminently practical affair. At stake was not just the
articulation of orthodoxy through listing the heretical beliefs of others, but
also the production of information on the beliefs of others for various legal
purposes, such as classification of who was or was not part of the ahl al-kitāb,
or “People of the Book,” which determined taxation and other matters.
The genre permits us access into the world of the construction of belief
and, in so doing, affords us a glimpse of how such construction needs—nay,
demands—the articulation of the misbelief of others. Heresiography, or the
genre of documenting and making lists of heresies, is—from the compar-
ative perspective that the history of religions offers us—a common way to
articulate orthodoxy. Heresiography functions in two primary ways: First,
it recounts the perceived heretical doctrines or ideas of others, showing how
they have either gone or been led astray; second, and most importantly, it
allows the group doing the writing to present what it is not, thereby defining
itself—socially, religiously, and politically—dialectically in relation to others.
Orthodoxy, in other words, demands heterodoxy and heresy for its own dog-
matic clarification. It is against the standards of orthodoxy that heresies are
ultimately judged and compared.
In this section I introduce three thinkers—Ibn azm (d.1064), al-
Shahrastānī (d.1153), and Ibn Taymiyya (d.1328)—who will make several
appearances in the chapters that follow, especially the sixth. Here, my goal is
simply to draw briefly on their work to show how that tradition thought with
and about Jews.86 Their concern, to be expected, is less about Judaism and
112 Subsequent Constructions

actual Jews so much as it is about understanding and articulating what they

consider to be their own normative construction of Islam. What follows does
not claim to be an exhaustive account of these three authors so much as a
survey of some of the themes whereby Judaism was constructed for a variety
of internal needs.87
Ibn azm was a medieval Andalusī polymath and the author of works
dealing with theology, jurisprudence, and literature. Perhaps his most fa-
mous work of theology is his Kitāb al-fi al fī l-milal wa-l-ahwā wa-l-ni al
(“Book of Distinctions Between Religions, Heresies, and Sects”), and hence-
forth referred to as Kitab al-Fi al, an encyclopedic text dealing with various
religions and sects.88 The work is arranged according to religious/philosoph-
ical groups that proximate Islam, beginning with those that are imagined to
be farthest removed to those that are regarded as the closest, before moving
on to a discussion of Muslim sects and heresies. Judaism, not surprisingly,
falls into the category of those religions that most closely approximate Islam.
This is why it is potentially so dangerous for him.
Al-Shahrastānī’s Kitab al-Milal wa al-Ni al (“Book of Religions and
Sects”), henceforth Kitāb al-Milal,89 is not nearly as combative or polemical
as that of Ibn azm. Using an obverse structure than the latter, Shahrastānī
begins his book with Muslim sects and ends with those religions or philos-
ophies that lack scriptures. Judaism, for him, is classified as a “religion of
the book” and appears immediately after his recounting of Muslim sects.
Finally, Ibn Taymiyya was, even in his own day, a controversial theolo-
gian, legist, and reformer.90 His iconoclastic views on widely accepted Sunnī
doctrines such as the veneration of saints and the visitation to their tomb-
shrines made him unpopular with the many other fellow Sunnī scholars of his
day. If he was so critical of mainstream Sunnī practice and belief, his venom
not surprisingly was also directed against non-Muslim religious traditions.
In terms of their actual writings, all three thinkers are in firm agreement
with the orthodox Sunnī position that held the Jews to be in theological
error on account of their incorrect beliefs. This was the direct result of their
having taken an original and pristine revelation and then having decided to
tamper with and corrupt it based on their own ideological desires. They thus
stand before the community of believers as people that went astray and—
just as importantly—they also function as a warning that, without proper
interventions, the same could happen to Muslims and Islam. Ibn azm, for
example, is critical of the ways in which the Jewish Bible presents its prophets
by ascribing to them sinful behavior. He writes, for example, that
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 113

by God, I have never seen a people that, while accepting the concept of
prophethood, ascribes to its prophets what those infidels ascribe to theirs.
They said of Abraham that he was married to his sister, who bore him Isaac.
Of Jacob they say that he married one woman, but that another woman
who was not his wife was brought to him, and that this woman, bore him
children from whom Moses, David, Solomon, and other prophets are
descended.91

Jews, in other words, tell lies about their prophets, who are, by extension,
also the prophets of Islam. Implicit here is that whereas the Jews defame their
prophets, the Qur ān portrays them as they really were, that is, as virtuous.
The Hebrew Bible is thus judged according to the narrative criteria provided
by the Qur ān and found wanting. Since the Hebrew Bible tells lies about the
lives of the prophets, it follows that the latter is a text that cannot be trusted
on other levels. To read the true accounts of Israel’s prophets, then, one must
read them as they are presented within the Qur ān. The Jews, according to
Ibn azm, quite simply do not understand their own scripture:

The books that the Jews ascribe to Solomon are three in number. One of
them is called shar hashīrīm, which means poem of poems [shi r al-ash ār],
but actually it is folly of follies [hawas al-ahwās], for it is a silly discourse
that makes no sense, and no one among [the Jews] knows its meaning. One
time [in it] a man is being courted, and then suddenly a woman. I have seen
[a Jew] go so far as to consider it an allegory of alchemy, which is another
fine delusion.92

Not only are Jews in theological error, according to Ibn azm, but also
they have so actively tampered with their scriptures that they no longer un-
derstand their true and original intent. It is a chicken-and-egg scenario, to
be sure, as the one necessarily leads into the other. Another motif in this lit-
erature is that Jews (and subsequently Christians) removed all references to
Muhammad and the inevitable coming of Islam in their scriptures. For ex-
ample, he writes that

in the sixty-first Psalm [actually Psalm 72], it is said that the Arabs and the
people of Saba will bring him riches and follow him [Psalm 72:10], and that
blood will have its price for him [Psalm 72:14]. This is an exact description
of the blood price [diya] that only our religion has. In the same Psalm it also
114 Subsequent Constructions

says, “And he will appear from Medina” [Psalm 72:16], just like that, liter-
ally. Now this is an obvious prediction of the Apostle of God.93

Once again, Ibn azm claims that the Torah of his time was not the authentic
one that was initially given to Moses. Here in particular, he takes the generic
term for city “madīna” and reads it as referring to the actual city of Medina in
the ijāz. A clear reference to Muhammad’s coming, he informs his readers,
has thus been erased from Jewish scriptures.
Though I shall have much more to say about al-Shahrastānī in chapter 6,
I want only to mention in the present context that his main goal, not unlike
that of Ibn azm, is that the Jews acknowledge that the Torah contains men-
tion of Abraham and his son Ismā īl, but that God in the Qur ān goes even
further when he announces that he will “bless Isma il and his progeny, I have
placed all good in them, I will dominate them over all nations, and I will soon
send in them a messenger from among them who will recite My verses upon
them.”94 Once again, the place to learn about Judaism is not Jewish scripture,
but the narratives that Islam has archived.
Like his predecessors, Ibn Taymiyya’s polemics against religious other
pivots around the notion that their scriptures are corruptions, some-
thing that led them to add innovations (bid a; pl. bid āt) to their traditions.
Prophets appear in them—prophets recognizable to any Muslim—but their
negative treatment therein, it is implied, clearly signals they are incorrect.
Again, the scriptures of previous religions attest to both the truth and supe-
riority of the Qur ān and Islam. Religious others’ pasts culminate in the pure
version found in Muslim scripture.
In his Kitāb al-Iman, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, based on qur ānic exe-
gesis, upholds that Muslims are not to befriend other monotheists. According
to him, God says,

“take note the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they
are but friends and protectors on one another. And he among you who
turns to them for friendship is one of them” [Q 5/51]. Indeed, God means
in these verses that he who takes Jews and Christians as friends is not a
believer. He also affirms that he who is a friend of one of them is one of
them. Indeed, in the Qur’ān the verses are in harmony with and support
one another. God says, “God has revealed the most beautiful Message in the
form of a Book consistent with itself, yet repeating its teaching in various
aspects” [Q 39/23].95
 Good Jew, Bad Jew 115

Here Ibn Taymiyya warns Muslims that they have all they need in the
Qur ān. To befriend rival monotheists, in other words, is to risk the same
fates that they suffered. Jews are mistrustful because, while appearing like
pious believers on the outside, there lurks in their hearts the kufr, something
that they seek to use to undermine Muslims. According to Ibn Taymiyya:

The hypocrite is certainly not a believer, and whoever describes him thus
is in error. The same applies to anyone in whose heart there resides know-
ledge and assent yet who at the same time displays ingratitude and enmity
toward the Messenger. Such were the Jews and others, whom God declares
to be unbelievers [kuffār] and never once referred to them as believers. . . .
God excludes from belief those who believe with their tongues and their
hearts but do not perform works.96

This theme is picked up in a significant fatwā of Ibn Taymiyya that further

touches upon the sensitive question of Jews and Christians who secretly be-
lieve in Islam, and of Muslims who outwardly show belief but in reality are
hypocrites hiding Jewish, Christian, or other beliefs. Some people claim that
the angels remove from their graves the bodies of the Jews and Christians
who secretly believed in Islam and place them in the graves of Muslims, and
in contrast remove the bodies of unbelieving Muslims from their graves
and place them in the graves of said Jews and Christians. Ibn Taymiyya
had no knowledge of such a tradition. He states, however, that the Jews and
Christians who secretly believed in Islam even if they did not declare their
belief in Islam at their death will be gathered on the Day of Resurrection
with the Muslims, while the unbelieving Muslims will be gathered with the
unbelievers, their equals.97
As I conclude this by no means exhaustive section, it is worth under-
scoring that the Sunnī theological tradition needs these minorities to func-
tion as exemplars of misbelief, since they are ultimately what makes proper
belief possible. Whether in the polemical accounts of Ibn azm and Ibn
Taymiyya or in the more benign and quasi-scientific account of Shahrastānī,
we must not lose sight of the fact that this literature is primarily interested in
reducing other religions to dogmas or caricatures that can subsequently be
conveniently—and, of course, problematically—compared to Sunnī Islam,
which is held up as the lodestar.

* * *
116 Subsequent Constructions

This chapter has sought to show the anxiety that Jews and Judaism produced
within the early Muslim community, something that only continued into
those who sought to represent it in subsequent centuries. Here we should do
well to remember that it was Judaism that was the religion that most closely
resembled Islam on the Arabian Peninsula in late antiquity, especially if we
keep in mind how A. F. L. Beeston referred to this Judaism less as some kind of
rabbinic orthodoxy and more as, what he called, “ imyarite Ra manism.”98
Such proximity, not to mention the large number of “Jews” said to exist in
Medina at the time of the ijra, meant that, from the very earliest period, the
young community had to distance itself from Judaism. This was certainly no
easy feat given the fact that the traces of Judaism permeated much early spec-
ulation found in the qur ānic text.
We see this ambiguity toward Judaism clearly in the tropes of the “good”
Jew and the “bad” Jew. Both of these literary figures would go on to perform
important work in the clarification of Muslim thought and practice. The
“bad” Jew tricks and threatens the community, often from within, whereas
the “good” Jew seeks to undo the damage that he causes. The latter, always a
convert, becomes the character that uncovers the filiations between ancient
Jewish lore and tradition on the one hand, and the new message of Islam on
the other. The one Jew, by necessity, needs the other for its existence, in much
the same manner that Islam needs Judaism more generally to articulate itself.
These two literary types embody that ambiguity and the anxiety that Jews
and Judaism produced for the framers of Islam. Jews are to be mistrusted,
even when they become Muslims, because they seek—at least in the narra-
tive that the subsequent Islamic tradition created for Judaism, itself based on
the qur ānic one—to undermine the religions of others. They did this previ-
ously to Christianity, and Muslims are warned to be on their guard lest they
do it to Islam as well. At the same time, however, Judaism—its narratives, its
monotheistic categories, and its prophetic pedigree—are essential to under-
standing the rise of the new message.
This anxiety, as we shall see in the following chapters, was not confined to
Jews and Judaism. If anything, the tensions inherent to Muslim portrayals of
Judaism are part of a much larger pattern of dealing with religious alterity.
 5
Making Christians

Certainly you will find that the most violent of people in enmity to
the believers are the Jews and the idolaters. Certainly you will find
that the closest to them in affection to the believers are those who
say, “We are Christians.” That is because there are priests and monks
among them, and because they are not arrogant.1

Do not let any food which you think resembles that of the Christians
cause any doubt in your heart.2

In his al-Radd alā l-na ārā, the belletrist and theologian al-Jā i (d. 255/
869) commented on the first of these two passages. Critical of the sectarian
nature of contemporary Christianity and seeking to define Islam in opposi-
tion to it, he neatly differentiates between forms of Christianity in his own day
and those that he considered to represent a pure and pristine Muhammadan
form of that religion in times past. This allowed him to underscore the im-
portance of monks like Ba īra, discussed previously, who had successfully
predicted Muhammad’s prophetic career and who had sought to protect the
young prophet from all those (read: Jews) who threatened to undermine his
message.3 This exercise allowed al-Jā i to accommodate positive references
to Christianity in the Qur ān and other early Islamic literature, while also
showing how that religion had devolved from its originary message. It was a
fine line, to be sure, but one that had to be traversed on account of the need to
acknowledge some imagined pure and authentic Christianity—which was,
after all, Islam—while also condemning its more modern iterations. Ba īra,
like so many of the individuals discussed in this study, functions as a textual
cipher that, in his case, provided Muslims access to earlier iterations of their
own religion. Islam was not a new religion, in other words, but had always
existed wherever righteous individuals were present. Islam was so signifi-
cant in this regard because it assembled such individuals into an umma of

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0006
118 Subsequent Constructions

believers. This meant that later thinkers, like al-Jā i , had to construct alter-
native narratives for other monotheistic traditions that fitted into the notion
that these religions, and their scriptures, were corrupt.
To mine the contours of Islam’s relationship to other religions was not, as
we have seen time and again, a straightforward affair. If the Muslim theolog-
ical tradition regarded them as corrupt and Islam as pure, why not simply
bypass earlier religions and forgo their narratives? This was not such an easy
process, however, given the fact that Islam only made sense if and when it
was situated against the much larger backdrop of the rise and fall of previous
monotheisms. Since these monotheisms were associated with the imperial
remains of grandiose civilizations into which Muslims armies entered, tales
of the former’s rise and fall had to be written. And since the Qur ān referred
so frequently to them, other religions had to be mapped, contextualized, and
“historicized” in a manner that made sense to Muslims. Positive characteris-
tics were neatly differentiated from negative ones, and in such a manner that
the former found their fullest expression in Islam.
This is certainly not unheard of in the history of religions. The new must un-
derstand itself in light of that which came before, especially when the former
taps into the frameworks of the latter. The new religion, in other words, must
be imagined to provide a better and more spiritually refined worldview than
its predecessors. This often involves a complex negotiation that shows just
when, where, and why the old went astray and what value might be inherited
and transformed. The manner whereby Christian thinkers imagined their re-
ligion as emerging from the ashes of Second Temple Judaism is perhaps most
apposite here. To make theological sense of the new message embodied in
the persona of Jesus, early Christian theologians, as early as Paul, had ac-
cused Jews of misreading and misunderstanding their scriptures.4 The his-
tory of religions also informs us that those points where similarities are most
acute and differences most pronounced involve the expenditure of signifi-
cant intellectual labor to account for difference while simultaneously nuan-
cing similarity. This not infrequently involves accusations of stubbornness,
excess, and infelicity on the part of the old. No religion, in other words, can
risk appearing fully de novo or contextless. On the contrary, the new has
to portray itself as providing a reformation, a perfection, or the like of that
which pre-existed it. Yet, figuring out the dynamics between new and old is
a potentially fraught activity and must therefore be carefully choreographed.
If we fast-forward to the other end of late antiquity, to the emergence of
Islam, we should not be surprised to find that of paramount importance on
 Making Christians 119

the part of its earliest framers was the desire to work out, often in painstaking
detail, the new tradition’s relationship to its predecessors. The Qur ān cer-
tainly provided an initial framework to undertake this endeavor; it was, after
all, full of—often contradictory, to be sure—references to Jews, Christians,
and others. This early account, however, subsequently needed to be ampli-
fied, supplemented, and further articulated, and often done so in such a
manner that later concerns and anxieties could be back-projected onto the
earliest period. The process was delicate, to be sure, since the Qur ān and
other early Islamic literature constructed Islam’s prophet using familiar Near
Eastern paradigms and presented him as following in the path of earlier
prophets whose message his was largely seen to agree with. Yet, if in agree-
ment, this gave rise to the inevitable question: If the same or similar, then
how was it different?
Islam’s self-understanding was predicated on maintaining this delicate
balance. One way to do this was for later Muslim theologians, following the
Qur ān’s lead, to differentiate between what Christianity (or Judaism) was at its
beginning and that into which it had currently devolved.5 Islam, on this reading
of other religions’ so-called histories, could now emerge on the scene to correct
the excesses of previous monotheisms. The framers of Islam now constructed
the tradition as paring away such accumulations and agglutinations and of-
fering a return to that which other religions had originally been. Within this
narrative, contemporaneous forms of earlier monotheisms were no longer
seen to be authentic versions of what they had initially been.
A second and related way to deal with other monotheisms was to under-
stand Islam as their correct and original versions. Other monotheisms, on
this reading, were essentially “Islamic” at earlier stages of their development
and their messages only subsequently corrupted by priests, bishops, rabbis,
and so on. Regardless of the paradigm, common to both is the notion that the
new transcends the old by reclaiming that which was originally good about
the latter while simultaneously discarding all those elements subsequently
deemed as irrelevant or even dangerous. Either way, imagined religious
others continue to function as the prime foils by which Islam could articulate
itself and clarify its doctrines and practices.
In the case of Christianity, this means that, not unlike the discussion of
Judaism witnessed in the previous chapter, the old had to be confronted
head-on, showing where, when, and by whom it went astray. This largely
involved—again this should come as no surprise given what we have al-
ready encountered—the need to create an Islamically infused “history”
120 Subsequent Constructions

for Christianity that could subsequently be used for Muslim self-under-

standing. Christianity was not to be understood on its own terms, in other
words, but only in an idealized and essentialized fashion that would fur-
ther aid in the articulation of Islam and a Muslim worldview. As a result,
Christianity was provided with a narrative of devolution: a pristine and pure
antiquity wherein the religion initially resembled Islam to its present bas-
tardized form.
Rather than simply employ the same strategy and structure as the previous
chapter, I want to pursue a different approach here. Obviously, Christianity
produced the same sort of textual and existential dilemmas for the early umma
as Judaism did, and thus engendered a similar set of responses. We see quite
a few texts, for example, devoted to undermining the beliefs and practices of
Christianity (e.g., Christology, trinitarian theology).6 Perhaps most famous
in this regard are works like Abd al-Jabbār’s (d. 415/1025) Tathbit dalā il
al-nubuwwa sayyidina Muhammad (“The Establishment of Proofs for the
Prophethood of Muhammad Our Master”)7 or Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawāb al-
a ī li-man baddala din al-masi (“The Correct Reply to Those Who Altered
the Religion of Christ”).8 While these and cognate texts will certainly make
appearances in what follows, I instead want to focus here on how, as Islam
spread into areas previously dominated by Christianity, Muslim conquerors
encountered numerous social, political, religious, and economic institutions
that they had to absorb and, in the process, make Islamic. The present chapter
thus supplements my discussion in the previous one by showing how the early
Muslim encounter with early Christian texts and institutions created a cog-
nate set of anxieties that had to be confronted and ultimately overcome.

Finding Qur ānic Christians

The Qur ān, as our major representative text of the early Muslim commu-
nity, does not quite know what to do with other monotheists. As witnessed in
this study’s first part, its attitude toward them constellates between praise and
disparagement.9 This ambiguity would seem to stem from the fact that, while
necessary, these other religions posed fundamental problems for the young
community. Not infrequently, the Qur ān, to signal its own originality and
to distinguish itself from its rivals, presented alternative events in the lives of
earlier prophets. Perhaps most famously in the account of the crucifixion of
Jesus found in Q 4/157–158:
 Making Christians 121

And for their saying, “Surely we killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the
Messenger of God”—yet, they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him,
but it [only] seemed like that to them. Surely those who differ about him
are indeed in doubt about him. They have no knowledge about him, only
the following of conjecture. Certainly, they did not kill him. No! God raised
him to Himself. God is mighty, wise.

Implicit in verses such as this is that the original message of the New
Testament has been tampered with.10 The real story of Jesus’s crucifixion is
not what Christians have traditionally thought it to be, and it is certainly not
the account presented in their New Testament.11 On the contrary, the true
version is the one that Islam has archived in its own foundational text. It is
the Qur ān and not the New Testament, in other words, that reveals the re-
ligious truths of Christianity, and what those who practice that religion are
supposed to believe.
Another way that the Qur ān undermines other religions is by providing
alternative renditions of prophetic sayings that were imagined to be lost. In
Q 19/30, for example, the infant Jesus speaks from the cradle, informing his
audience that he is both a servant of God ( abd Allāh) and a prophet (nabī),
that is, that he is not the son of God, and that he has been given a scripture
(al-kitāb). In Q 61/6, we read the following: “And remember when Jesus, son
of Mary, said, ‘Sons of Israel! Surely I am the Messenger of God [rasūl Allāh]
to you, confirming what was before me of the Torah [al-tawra], and bringing
good news of a messenger [rasūl] who will come after me, whose name will
be A mad.’ ” The Qur ān here implies that Jesus, as both a human and a rasūl,
predicted the coming of Muhammad, who is here given the variant name
of “A mad.” The implication is that verses such as these were excised from
the book that would eventually become the New Testament. The accounts of
Jesus’s life found in Christian scriptures are here used to offer further proof
that Christianity is corrupt.
Earlier monotheistic communities, recalling the discussion from the
previous chapter, are presented as having tampered with their scriptures.
Juxtaposed against them, Islam emerges as both uncorrupted and incorrupt-
ible, but also—and perhaps paradoxically—as equally ancient. Also impor-
tant to note is that implicit in such stories and accounts is the fate of these
earlier monotheisms and the necessity of guarding one’s religion from such
perfidy. It is against this larger backdrop of corruption and concealment
that the Qur ān and those early framers of the tradition create the existential
122 Subsequent Constructions

space to make sense of Islam’s similarities and differences with other reli-
gious traditions.
The basic Muslim narrative maintains that at the time of Muhammad,
there existed very few Christians who possessed the true and uncorrupted
Gospel of Jesus. Those who did and who practiced the religion as Jesus had
intended are the ones who are, perhaps not surprisingly, most amenable to
Muhammad and his message. Since Christianity’s original message—not un-
like that of Judaism—was Islam, those who understood it properly and in its
uncorrupted form would have no problem either recognizing or accepting
the new religion.
Moving from the realm of theological polemics to that of history, the rapid
military success and political expansion of the new religion certainly inten-
sified its notion that it alone possessed the true account of things and thus
was religiously superior to its predecessors and the accounts they offered.12
If Islam was a false religion, founded upon—at least according to its critics—
garbled accounts that they inherited or took from others,13 why was Islam so
historically powerful? If Arabs were illiterate and backward, in other words,
why would God have permitted them to overthrow simultaneously both the
Persian and Byzantine armies and take over their lands and, by extension,
their populations? It was these populations, after all, that were quickly filling
the expanding ranks of Muslims. And, as we shall see in greater detail here,
much time and energy went into dealing with such demographic and geo-
graphic expansion. Indeed, the time and energy in dealing with what existed
previously in now nominally Muslim areas played a crucial role in the cre-
ation of the medieval Middle East. Islam was increasingly filtered through
the categories that Christianity (like Judaism) presented and that Muslims
inherited. It was, however, an anxious inheritance. Just as the early framers
of Islam sought to create requisite existential space for the new religion by
creating alternative histories for older monotheisms, they were also respon-
sible for creating the requisite legal and political space using the institutional
structures they inherited from previous imperial powers in the region.

Christians and Christianity in Islamic Exegesis

As Muslims entered new territories, they encountered a repertoire of

symbols and narratives that could be used to explain their own monothe-
istic past within a late Roman Christian tradition.14 No group, expectations
 Making Christians 123

to the contrary, possessed a monopoly over the monotheistic past. Recycling

earlier narratives and symbols, often in contradictory ways, permitted
groups—among them Eastern Christians, Jews, and now Muslims—to re-
cast and imagine their own pasts. This thinking with and about other groups
with the goal of articulating oneself formed an intricate part of late antiq-
uity self-definition. The conception of collective identity, to use the lan-
guage of Erich S. Gruen, “in terms of (rather than in contrast to) another
culture forms a significant ingredient in the ancient outlook.”15 In Gruen’s
apt formulation:

When ancients reconstructed their roots or fashioned their history, they

often did so by associating themselves with the legends and traditions of
others. That practice affords a perhaps surprising but certainly revealing
insight into the mentalities of Mediterranean folk in antiquity. It discloses
not how they distinguished from others but how they transformed or
reimagined themselves for their own purposes. The “Other” takes on quite
a different shape. This is not rejection, denigration, or distancing—but
rather appropriation. It represents a more circuitous and a more creative
mode of fashioning self-consciousness.16

Islam’s religious and social boundaries could thus be configured (and

reconfigured) and maintained by appealing to the narratives of the others,
but in such a manner that these narratives were now reappropriated and
recycled for their own ends. This was not a simple repudiation of the past.
Though later thinkers might be able to differentiate neatly and essentially be-
tween “Islam” and “non-Islam,” the situation was often far more complex.
A set of symbols, topoi, and narratives now began, in the words of Thomas
Sizgorich, “new careers in the nascent Muslim umma’s narration of events.”17
And “this redeployment of older topoi,” according to Phillip Wood, “is an
indication of how far the pervasive influence of Roman ideas could outstrip
the fall of the empire itself.”18 In this regard the expanding Muslim commu-
nity began to redeploy for their own ends the ideas and institutions inherited
from older empires in the region.
The appropriation of other pasts into the Muslim historical imagination
helped to establish a relevant pre-Islamic history, both for Islam and for the
other monotheisms it encountered. The latter were now understood solely
from the perspective of Islam, either as leading up to or as falling away from
it.19 Not only did this allow Muslims to create a past and an identity for
124 Subsequent Constructions

themselves, but also it enabled them to situate that past and identity into the
narrative frameworks supplied by others.
Before examining this in greater detail, however, it might be worth
recalling briefly just what kind of Christians the early Muslims encoun-
tered. It seems that the major form of Christianity that they would have been
exposed to in the early conquest period was largely Syrian,20 whether of the
Jacobite or Nestorian variety, in addition to others including Monophysites
who were most likely related to the Monophysite Church of Abyssinia.21 This
would have been especially the case in places such as al- īra (modern south-
central Iraq), an oasis that had close relations with Mecca and that functioned
as a large Christian center and as the diocese of the Eastern Church between
the fourth and eleventh centuries.22 Christian ideas, whether encountered
through the regular channels supplied by trade routes or in the form of lit-
erary themes and references in the poetry of Arab poets like Imrū al-Qais,
would certainly have existed in the ambient air that pre-Islamic Arabs
breathed. Christians, not unlike Jews, that these Arabs encountered formed
the backdrop against which ideas of monotheism—no matter how inchoate,
garbled, or syncretic—ultimately developed. Even if Tannous is correct and
everyday believers knew very little of doctrinal intricacy, not to mention
the difference between competing beliefs of Christology, let alone church
teaching,23 it is still fair to assume that such believers, both Christian and
pre-Islamic Arab, were familiar with at least some of the general and most
basic themes of Christianity. Despite the many initial overlaps—in terms
both of material culture and of doctrines/beliefs—there seems to have been
some sort of a distinction between “Islam” and “non-Islam.”
My goal here is not to revert to the Orientalist assumption that the
Qur ān—and thus early Islam—can simply be reduced to outside influence.24
Such an argument has thankfully been put to rest, though of course it lingers
in certain political discussions.25 Again, the working assumption of this
study is that Islam was produced in a highly eclectic and fluid moment in
late antiquity, one wherein ideas circulated freely and in such a manner that
they were the common property of various social groups that laid claim to
them. Despite this, however, there was still the need on the part of religious
polemicists to show how and why one’s own group functioned as the most
authentic heir to such ideas. This translated into the need on the part of early
qur ānic exegetes to show exactly how, when, and where other religions went
astray and departed from their pristine (read: Islamic) teachings. According
to al- abarī, for example:
 Making Christians 125

After Jesus, kings distorted the Torah and the Gospel. The kings summoned
people to choose between death and relinquishing their reading of their
books, except what had been distorted. A group of them chose to live on pil-
lars, others to roam about, eating what beasts eat, others built monasteries
in the deserts, digging wells and growing herbs. Each group was imitated by
others, but they [eventually] became polytheists. When Muhammad came,
only a few of them remained. Then the hermits descended from their cells,
the monks came out of their convents, and the roaming monks came back
from their wandering. All of them believed in him and gave credence to
him. These are the ones that have a twofold recompense (Q:57/28).26

Al- abarī explains here that it is these hermetic Christians, maintaining

secretly the pure tradition and in danger of persecution, who recognized
Muhammad as a prophet and messenger of God. This theme, seen earlier in
the likes of al-Jā i , is recurring in this literature. There existed a few good
Christians during the early Islamic period, but the overwhelming majority
instead followed corrupted teachings. The “good” Christians—not unlike the
“good” Jews encountered in the previous chapter—now had to be made to
attest to the new religion. The way this was done textually was to transform
the Christianity of these monks and hermits into Islam. This is ultimately
why they are able immediately to recognize Muhammad and the truth of his
message.
We see in stories such as the aforementioned how real flesh-and-blood
Christians and historical Christian communities gradually became folded
under two basic literary types. The first are those who followed in the way of
later kings who had tampered with the Gospel. The second consists of those
who rejected this religion and instead opted to keep the true teachings in
secret, preserving it so that it could be enfolded into the new message that
resembled it. This is not unlike what we witnessed with Jews, who, it will be
recalled, were reduced to two types: pure ones who had converted to Islam
and those who either refused or who acted in subversive ways after they
had converted. These two perspectives were neatly enfleshed in the literary
character of the “good Jew” (e.g., Ka b al-A bār) and the “bad Jew” (e.g.,
Abdallāh ibn Saba’).
The concept of isrā īliyyāt, also discussed previously, functioned as a broad
enough category to include Christian or supposedly Christian materials
meant to show historical narratives or other folkloric legends.27 Though
eventually rejected as problematic, it is worth noting that many of the
126 Subsequent Constructions

earliest exegetes drew copiously upon them, and most later commentators
continued to make significant use of such stories even after they had been
deemed a problem. Such stories enabled subsequent framers of Islam to
shape Christians into whatever forms they needed them to play. It is perhaps
worth noting that “the Christian convert,” however, did not play nearly the
same prominent role as “the Jewish convert” in thinking about alterity and its
dangers. For some commentators though—most notably, the Abbāsid histo-
riographer Sayf ibn Umar al-Tamīmī —it is Paul who plays a similar role to
Abdallāh ibn Saba , the Jewish convert from an a , since he is the one held to
be responsible for leading Christians astray from their true calling, just as Ibn
Saba was responsible for introducing discord into the young community.28
Like Ibn Saba , however, Paul is also a perfidious Jew who only pretends to
have converted to another religion.
The true followers of Jesus, according to these narratives, are Muslims.
According to Muqātil’s exegetical comments to Q 3/55, for example, “people
of the religion of Jesus are the Muslims [al-muslimūn] above all the religions.”
The framers of Islam thus saw Muhammad’s message as God’s desire to re-
store the true teaching of Jesus, thereby reclaiming it. For Muslim exegetes,
Jesus brought, not unlike Muhammad, a set of laws given to him by God.
Though Jesus confirmed the laws of Moses, his were regarded to be more
lenient. According to al- abarī, “the law with which Jesus came was much
more lenient than that which Moses brought. In the Torah revealed by Moses
the flesh of the camel and the fats [thurūb] were forbidden. But these are per-
mitted in the law revealed by Jesus: the spur of the rooster, fats, kinds of fish
or of birds that have no claws.”29
Islam, the law of Muhammad, thus stands at the end of a long line of
prophets and their messages codified in books. True Christians rec-
ognize this: either as being actual muslimūn at heart or in converting to
the new message. These two typologies functioned as important ways to
understand Christianity. Reduced to these types, deprived of historicity,
Christians and Christianity become necessary weigh stations on the way to
Islam. It is worth noting, however, that the first type—that of the authentic
Christian muslim—poses certain problems since they never effectively
converted to Islam. They thus become literary types that appear in the early
period—like Ba īra—to attest to Muhammad and his message but then
disappear almost as quickly as they had appeared. After this early period
where a few pure Christians and Jews were thought to roam the land to at-
test to the new dispensation, within a generation or two after Muhammad,
 Making Christians 127

Christians and Jews are deemed to be in theological error and thus essen-
tially irredeemable.

Muslim Assemblages

In a world, at least initially, where Muslims were few and Christians many,
and where everywhere Muslims went they confronted the remnants of erst-
while Christian hegemony, it was necessary to make sense of what they
encountered.30 It was in formerly Roman territories, as Jack Tannous has
so well argued, that Islam began to slowly emerge and from which it grad-
ually developed. The majority of Muslims in the Middle East were after all
descendants, wholly or partially, of converts from Christianity.31 The ques-
tion of how the young community chose to define itself, and its concerns,
in relationship to Christianity would prove to be a fundamental aspect of
its identity. This could give rise to simple and practical matters, such as
the slaughtering of meat. “You have settled among the Persians and the
Nabateans,” Abdallāh Ibn Mas ūd said, “therefore when you buy meat, if it
is slaughtered by a Jew or a Christian, then eat it, but if a Magian slaughtered
it, do not eat it.”32 Alternatively, such concerns could take on greater meta-
physical weight. For example, we read of Christian holy men healing Muslim
leaders by making the sign of the cross in the name of Jesus over their eyes.33
Metaphysics and theological doctrine aside, however, we should heed
Tannous’s reminder that, no matter what the religion, sect, or denomination,
“all the people we are dealing with in the seventh, eighth, and later centuries
had one fundamental and unescapable fact in common: they were human
beings and, as such, shared the same worries and anxieties over health,
safety, their families, death, and the afterlife.”34 Rather than posit the discrete
traditions of later centuries onto the time in question, by which point issues
of law and politics had largely become increasingly settled and firm, it is cer-
tainly more helpful to see a fluidity between groups and ideas during this
early period. Perhaps nowhere is this on clearer display than when Mu āwiya,
upon the death of the last of the rashidūn, Alī, decided to pray at Golgotha
and Gethsemane after being made Commander of the Faithful (amir al-
mu minūn).35 Even as late as the third/ninth century, we continue to see this
fluidity when the great jurist Ibn anbāl (d. 241/855), when being asked if
Jews and/or Christians could join Muslims in praying for rain, for example,
saw no problem.36 This is in addition to the copious amounts of evidence
128 Subsequent Constructions

surveyed by Tannous in his analysis of how “simple” Christian believers

retained many of the same practices, beliefs, and customs when they became
“simple” Muslim believers.37
Unlike Judaism, however, which possessed little real political power in the
seventh century, the institutional structures of Byzantine might and power
were omnipresent. In these early centuries, as orthodoxy was still being
articulated, and as the majority of new Muslims descended from former
Christian converts, we should not be surprised to learn that what were
Christian rights and practices quite quickly took on a fairly thin Muslim
veneer. The question we have to ask ourselves is: How did Muslims relate to
and appropriate the traditions—cultural, religious, intellectual, and legal—
of the various conquered they found themselves ruling over by the mid-sev-
enth century? As Islam moved from being a minority religion, surrounded
by ancient and rival communities, to a majority one, it did so by increasingly
defining itself against the claims and doctrines encountered among their
rivals. The result is that Islam, in wanting to carve out and subsequently
articulate its differences, nevertheless remained intimately connected to
the various legal and cultural structures that it inherited. Indeed, these
inherited structures actively produced what would come to be recognizable
as “Islamic.”
One of the main ways that this happened, to return to the work of Tannous,
was through appeals to simple believers. Since the majority of Muslims, like
the majority of Christians before them, were not interested in high-minded
theological debates over the finer points of doctrine, he argues, many tasked
with the spread and development of Islamic teaching did so in ways that these
simple believers could understand. To do this, they had to make connections
between the old and the new—not so that the new erased the old, but in a way
that the new transformed the old.
Yet despite prophetic warnings—“he who imitates a people is one of
them”—such imitation, though of course it was never understood as such,
largely continued unabated.38 Indeed, it was on account of this shared reper-
toire of doctrines, practices, and customs that there needed to be a distinctly
Muslim assemblage. No matter how hard the resistance on the part of Islamic
elites, this admixture continued. Those who resisted, however, ultimately de-
fined Islam in opposition, whether in whole or in parts, to this assemblage.
The anxiety of who had what first, or what went where, played a huge role in
what would emerge as orthodoxy.
 Making Christians 129

Creating a State

The generation after Muhammad, Muslims rapidly took command of a

state.39 This was in large part owing to their ability to create an Arabic-lan-
guage administration, in addition to being able to raise revenues and feed
armies.40 It was the Arabic language, as witnessed in chapter 3, that aided
greatly in facilitating a distinctiveness between Arabs and conquered
populations. This was undoubtedly related to the appearance of the Qur ān,
a text that self-consciously refers to itself as an Arabic text, thereby further
cementing a common identity among Arabic speakers, who imagined them-
selves as in possession of a text that defined their superiority among all other
peoples.41 The Arabs thus possessed from a relatively early period a sense of
their own distinctive language and descent, both of which were imagined to
provide them with certain advantages (in this world and the next) denied to
others.
While non-Arabs could convert and acquire such advantages, they could
only do so by acquiring a tribal identity as mawālī.42 This meant that Islam
in the conquest period appeared, at least initially, as an ethnic religion that
sought to impose its political will on the regions it absorbed.43 The conquests
would certainly have provided a sense of divine legitimacy to those who
shared a similar origin and language, with the success of the early conquests
only intensifying this notion. Yet, since the Arabs had no indigenous state
structure of their own to offer, and even those structures that had survived
from the pre-Islamic Near East were often considered illegitimate in religious
terms, new and creative ways of administration had to be produced. While
modifying tribal structures and/or the creation of a service aristocracy with
a deracinated army offered potential solutions, my concern here is with how
the conquerors had to make the new religion universal enough to embrace
non-Arab Muslims and, concomitantly, be able to take local traditions and
Islamicize them. In this, the precedent had already been set by the catholic
nature of the Roman Imperial Church from which it largely took over. Yet,
in keeping with the larger theme of this study, such universalization, I wish
to suggest, came with its own set of anxieties, as the newly minted imperial
religion had to rule over vast territories and their increasing, and ethnically
diverse, Muslim populations.
Phillip Wood has recently argued that prior experience of the way in which
the Christian Roman Empire dealt with the Jews was structurally similar to
130 Subsequent Constructions

the way that the early Muslims categorized and ruled over their non-Muslim
populations.44 This is perhaps not surprising given the fact that the Qur ān,
and those who held it to be the word of God, entered regions in which The
Theodosian Code had already divvyed up religious communities according
to an orthodoxy/heterodoxy binary, into which space had to be made for le-
gally acceptable, if theologically inaccurate, religions such as Judaism. The
Qur ān certainly inherited this social and political world wherein communal
divisions based on religion were largely taken for granted as the predominant
means of identifying individuals and their loyalties.
In this and the following section I want to make the case that in inheriting
this political world, the early Muslim umma sought to transform Islam into
an imperial religion not unlike what legal texts such as The Theodosian Code
had done for Christianity. It did this by, among other things, (1) fixing the
terms of proper belief and doctrine (i.e., orthodoxy), (2) defining certain
Muslim sects as heretical, and (3) denigrating those religions (or, alterna-
tively, sects within one’s own tradition) that were now imagined to be super-
seded. Just as the Code sought to put Judaism in its place through a series of
legal, social, and other restrictions, early Islam, and the texts associated with
it, sought to do the same with both Judaism and Christianity. Such a claim
does not mean that the early framers of Islam read over The Theodosian Code
or were even necessarily familiar with its claims. It does mean, however, that
Muslims inherited a political structure that was, at base, underscored by a set
of mechanisms that were indebted to the religio-political worldview supplied
by the Code.
Like the imperial structures they inherited, Muslims did this through a
condemnation of innovation and the concomitant articulation of a single
path toward what was imagined, at least in retrospect, as orthodoxy. One of
the major ways to justify these legal categories was by falling back on the-
ological difference, discussed earlier in this chapter. Non-Muslims were si-
multaneously the bearers of a proto-Islam on the one hand and corrupters of
that pre-Muhammadan Islam on the other. This allowed Muslim authors to
construct pasts for other religions in ways that they could understand and to
explain why, even after the advent of Islam, they would remain non-Muslim.
As we have seen, the Muslim construction of a Christian past permitted
Muslim writers to tap into the antiquity of its doctrines while clearly dif-
ferentiating the new religion from the old. This gave way to the idea of an
authentic version of Christianity (imagined as Islam) distinct from the
corrupting influence of the imperial church. The implication is that by the
 Making Christians 131

time of the conquests all true Christians would have already converted to
Islam, since true Christianity prophesied Islam. Those who remained
Christians could now be rebranded as mushrikūn, deemed deserving of
their subordinate status. In al-Azdī’s Futū al-shām, for example, Christians
are simply dismissed as mushrikūn or kuffār, and the wars of conquest in
Syria are simply continuations of Muhammad’s wars against the mushrikun
of Mecca.

The Theodosian Code and the Shurū Umar

The Theodosian Code (438), written in the context of the Arian controversy,
represented a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire. It was con-
cerned, among other things, with the imposition and subsequent mainte-
nance of orthodoxy as the official religion of the empire. Most importantly,
however, it was a Roman code whose structure was meant to reflect the uni-
fied empire of the first four centuries of the Christian era.45 Another central
aspect of the Code is that it established one language, Latin, as the official
legal and economic language in which the internal business of the entire em-
pire was conducted.46 A common language, not insignificantly, functioned—
both for the Romans as it would for Muslims—as the foundation for unifying
a religiously and socially diverse empire.47
One of the major preoccupations of the imperial religion was weeding out
heresy (including those beliefs formerly seen as legitimate) and overlaying it
with what was slowly emerging as orthodoxy. More important than weeding
out Jews and pagans, it was Christian heretics—those whom the Code was
trying to define as holding “incorrect” views on Christology or trinitari-
anism—that threatened the unity of the early church and, by implication,
the state that did the church’s bidding. One of the major ways that this was
done was to make such incorrect or improper beliefs illegal. According to
the opening paragraph of The Theodosian Code, for example:

It is our will that all the various peoples that are subject to our clemency
and moderation, shall practice that religion which the divine Apostle Peter
delivered to the Romans, as the religion which he introduced makes clear
even unto this day. It is evident that this is the religion that is followed by the
Pontiff Damascus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic
sanctity. According to the apostolic discipline and the evangelic doctrine
132 Subsequent Constructions

we shall believe in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity.
We command that those persons who follow this law shall embrace
the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom we adjudge
demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their
meeting places shall not receive the name of the churches, and they shall be
smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own
initiative. Which we shall assume in accordance with divine judgement.48

Those bishops and priests who had refused to assent to these theological
principles are now denounced as “demented and insane” and branded as he-
retical. “All who dissent from the communion of the faith of those who have
been expressly mentioned in this special enumeration,” the document con-
tinues, “shall be expelled from their churches as manifest heretics and here-
after shall be altogether denied the right and power to obtain churches, in
order that the priesthood of the true Nicene faith may remain pure.”49 The
point does not need to be emphasized on account of its obvious nature, but,
for the sake of reiteration, the articulation of “proper” belief can only occur
when there are perceived “improper” beliefs against which to juxtapose
them. There then continues, in a fairly straightforward manner, the proper
criteria for establishing church leadership and, just as importantly, their im-
munity from structures of taxation.50 Insulting the “true” religion is now
seen as not just a religious or theological crime, but also a legal one. We read,
for example, that

there shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to
argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel. If any person
hereafter, with flagrant and damnable audacity, should suppose that he may
contravene any law of this kind or if he should dare to persist in his action
of ruinous obstinacy, he shall be restrained with a due penalty and proper
punishment.51

With statements such as these, “orthodox” Christianity emerges as the

official and legal state religion of the Roman Empire. The Code, or at least
its sixteenth and final book, obsesses with weeding out those rival forms of
Christianity now defined as “heresies.” All those individuals or groups, as the
passages above amply attest, opposed to the “true Nicene faith” threatened to
undermine the Church’s foundation from within. This, of course, was more
 Making Christians 133

dangerous than the existence of other religions, most notably Judaism. The
Theodosian Code established, in other words, the legal mechanism to amelio-
rate the anxiety caused by rival Christian forms, which could then be written
off as sectarian or, even worse, as heretical and subsequently persecuted.
If intra-Christian heresies needed to be excised, also of concern were other
religious traditions. Though Judaism, as we shall see shortly, was granted cer-
tain protections, other religions were not so fortunate. Manicheanism, for
example, was now deemed illegal, most likely on account of its use of certain
Christian beliefs and the fact that, at the time, it considered itself to repre-
sent true Christianity and thus functioned as the main religion to rival the
church. According to the Code:

Wherever an assembly of Manicheans or such a throng is found their

teachers shall be punished with a heavy penalty. Those who assemble shall
also be segregated from the company or men as infamous and ignominious,
and the houses and habitations in which the profane doctrine is taught shall
undoubtedly be appropriated to the resources of the public treasury.52

The Code also betrays a sense of anxiety when it comes to “paganism.” We

read, for example:

We interdict all persons of criminal pagan mind from the accursed im-
molation of victims, from damnable sacrifices, and from all other such
practices that are prohibited by the authority of the more ancient sanctions.
We command that all their shrines, temples, and sanctuaries, if even now
any remain entire, shall be destroyed by the command of the magistrates,
and shall be purified by the erection of the sign of the venerable Christian
religion. All men shall know that if it should appear, by suitable proof be-
fore a competent judge, that any person has mocked this law, he shall be
punished with death.53

The significance of such imperial pronouncements when it comes to pa-

ganism, according to Fergus Millar, resides in what is absent as opposed to
what is explicitly present since nothing in them reflects coherent public dis-
course.54 However, it was officially tolerated religions like Judaism—and by
extension Samaritanism—that also caused considerable anxiety.55 Unlike
pagans and those Christians belonging to groups now imagined as heretical,
the practice of Judaism by Jews was not only not forbidden but also positively
134 Subsequent Constructions

protected—though conversion to it (by, for example, slaves) was, as was

the construction of new synagogues and Jews’ holding imperial office.56
Contemporaneous evidence, to cite Millar once again, “shows a persistent
strain of anxiety about, and hostility to, Judaism on the part of Christians, as
well as disputes between Jews and Christians on matters of doctrine and bib-
lical interpretation.”57
We see this anxiety throughout the Code whenever it deals with Judaism.
There is, for example, a fear that Jews will overpopulate municipal offices58
or, in the secrecy provided by the home or synagogue, insult the patriarchs.59
Most pervasive, though, is the fear that Jews actively mock Christian practice.
“We decree that the Jews also shall be admonished that they perchance shall
not become insolent and elated by their own security,” we read, so that they
“commit any rash act in disrespect of the Christian religion.”60 Most serious
are those accounts of Jewish rituals that occur during the holiday of Purim:

The governors of the provinces shall prohibit the Jews, in a certain cere-
mony of their festival of Haman in commemoration of some former pun-
ishment, from setting fire to and burning a simulated appearance of the
holy cross, in contempt of the Christian faith and with sacrilegious mind,
lest they associate the sign of our faith with their places. They shall main-
tain their own rites without contempt of the Christian law, and they shall
unquestionably lose all privileges that have been permitted them heretofore
unless they refrain from unlawful acts.61

Despite word of such zealous performance of their rituals, Jews are never-
theless allowed to continue to practice their own rituals and “therefore be ex-
empt from the compulsory public services of decurions and shall obey their
own law.”62 Despite the protection, however, we get a real sense of the anxiety
that their existence creates since the Code seeks to control them and curtail
their movements, thereby limiting their potential infringement on the cath-
olic community.63 Judaism thus functioned as the imagined external other,
legal but anxiety producing, protected but feared. Non-Christian beliefs and
practices thereby created imperial rhetoric that was coupled with the church’s
own expression of piety in the face of other types of belief.
The Code presents us with a very early attempt in the late antique world
to deal with religious difference. Perhaps of necessity, it betrays an inevi-
table anxiety about other sects and religions.64 Those that do not fall in line
with the Catholic Church must be barred and excised and their religious
 Making Christians 135

practices limited, by whatever means—legal, religious, social—possible. It

was into this social world, where peoples and groups were divvyed up ac-
cording to religious beliefs, that Islam appeared and, quite quickly, emerged
and flourished. One of the ways it did this was by taking over the imperial
structures and other administrative frameworks that it inherited.
It might be worthwhile to compare the Code to one of the most important
documents in Islam to deal with religious others and that sought to define
their place within (or outside of) the body politic. I wish to suggest that as the
Muslims conquered the Roman Near East, they taxonomized and ruled over
non-Muslim populations in a manner that was structurally similar to the way
in which Christian Romans treated their legal minorities, to wit, Judaism and
to a lesser extent Samaritanism. Both sought to do this moreover through the
condemnation of innovation and the definition of a rather narrow path of
what was imagined to be orthodoxy.
The so-called Pact of Umar (shurū Umar), as witnessed in chapter 2, was
responsible for dealing with groups professing other religions. Not unlike
The Theodosian Code, it was responsible for establishing and giving a legal
basis to the rights and restrictions to be enjoyed by non-Muslims (ahl al-
dhimma) living under Islamic rule.65 Regardless of its authenticity—that is,
whether or not Umar, the second caliph, actually wrote it—I am more inter-
ested in its ninth-century use, namely, the point at which it became legally
binding on all religious minorities within the orbit of Islam.66 The document
stipulates, as we have seen, obligations enforced upon the conquered in ex-
change for legal and physical protection. These include, again as witnessed
in chapter 2, clauses that demand these minorities be loyal and respectful
in their religious ceremonies and public displays, and that call for the strict
separation and maintenance of social differentiation between Muslims and
non-Muslims, such as the need for distinct dress and language.
Like the Code, the shurū Umar is an attempt to deal with religious oth-
erness and to define group identity along linguistic and religious lines. Less
concerned with internal heresies than the Code, the document nonetheless
seeks to define orthodoxy through the maintenance of religious difference.
Religious beliefs—whether Jewish and pagan in the case of the Code or Jewish
and Christian according to the shurū Umar—were defined and categorized
in terms of the proper/improper and orthodox/heretical binaries. This is in
keeping with the argument of Michael Morony that one of the most impor-
tant transformations in Middle Eastern society between the fourth and ninth
centuries was a shift from a society that defined personal identity in terms of
136 Subsequent Constructions

“language, occupation, or geographic location” to one in which religion be-

came the paramount way of so doing.67 This shift in emphasis, he argues, was
.

fundamental to the formation of Islamic society and represents one of the

biggest differences between Muslim and Hellenistic societies.
To rule over the conquered, the early Muslim conquerors needed a
paradigm with which to face—and ultimately to categorize—the rival
monotheisms that they encountered. This was all done with an eye toward
defining, delineating, and patrolling the boundaries of orthodoxy. These reli-
gious others could then be used in the service of articulating the legal, social,
and religious supremacy of orthodoxy. My interest here, to reiterate, is not to
define the legal state of such religious others, but to show how they contrib-
uted so positively by the act of their very negation to Islamic orthodoxy. In
inheriting the legal infrastructure of Roman imperialism, Muslim authori-
ties were able to command and run a state, which certainly contributed to the
emergence of Islam as a distinctive religion.
As Islam became an imperial religion, it had to denigrate the faiths of
others, but especially those faiths that it was imagined to supersede and
which, by definition, it most closely resembled. This is why, as this study has
sought to argue, much time and energy was (and indeed still is) spent on
characterizing and mischaracterizing other religions. The maintenance of
Islam is, quite literally, contingent upon such activity.

The Normative Critique of Christianity

We witness this in the subsequent tradition of heresiology. Though much

later than the late antique sources surveyed earlier, these writings permit yet
another window through which we access how what emerged as Sunnī or-
thodoxy continued to think with and about Christianity.68 Most of this anti-
Christian polemical literature is interested in at what point Christianity went
from being a religion that resembled, if not actually was, Islam to a bastard-
ized and corrupt version thereof. Most seem to locate the blame squarely at
the feet of “the accursed” (al-la īn) Paul. The latter character, as we have seen,
is the one held responsible for adapting the original and authentic message
of Jesus to, among other things, Roman tastes. According to Abd al-Jabbār,
for example, “Paul was an evil, disgusting Jew, pursuing wickedness and
intent upon vicious acts, an inciter of seditions, a seeker of leadership and
 Making Christians 137

governance for which he strove in every way.”69 Once again, it is a perfidious

Jew who is at the center of this heretical innovation, and it is this Jew who is
held to be responsible for the corruption of Jesus’s Islam.
The intent of such documentation, and the subsequent warnings that issue
therefrom, is clear: Muslims must not follow the same fate as the Christians
to whose originary message they are the natural heirs. Since true revelation
comes only through prophets whom God has charged to provide authentic
revelation to humanity, it is necessary to safeguard it and prevent those who
act in bad faith from tampering with it. This is what Jews and Christians have
done in the past, and, as we shall see in the following chapter, it is also what
Sunnī heresiologists accuse the Shī a of doing in the present.
According to Ibn azm, it was various priests and bishops who built upon
the innovation of Paul until “there was not a thing in the Gospel that deter-
mined the text of the creed without which faith [īmān], according to them, is
not complete, except the mentioning together of the father, the son, and the
holy spirit. Whatever else is in it is merely the imitation [taqlid] of their early
generation of bishops.”70
Christians have erred in replacing the teachings of the prophets with
those of bishops (or rabbis in the case of Jews). Human ideology, according
to this reasoning, has been elevated to the level of divine speech. Ibn azm
goes so far as to apply Islamic legal reasoning to show the incorrectness of
Christianity. Using the principle of kāffa, or the necessity of trustworthy
witnesses, he attempts to show that Jesus’s death on the cross, as per Christian
teaching, would have been impossible to prove. He argues that there were not
sufficiently reliable witnesses, or of sufficient number, to attest to the cruci-
fixion, and without compelling evidence, it is not to be believed as credible.71
Ibn azm thus subverts the central idea of Christology using the principles
supplied by the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence.
Or, in like manner, subsequent commentators need to square the positive
references to Christians and Christianity in the Qur ān with negatives ones.
If scripture says conflicting things about Christians, there must be good
reason. Al-Jā i , the prose writer and theologian discussed in this chapter’s
opening, sought to square the differences between Christians of his own
day and those mentioned favorably in the Qur ān by implying that the two
represent completely different species from one another. Christians of his
own day, according to him, like to pretend that they are the heirs to qur ānic
Christians. They do this, according to him, by
138 Subsequent Constructions

craftily using [verses in the Qur ān] to seduce the common and the vulgar. In
the very verses lies the proof that here God is not referring to the Christians
we are acquainted with nor to those associated with the Melchites and the
Jacobites, but rather to the type of Ba īra, and the kind of monks whom
Salmān [an early Persian convert to Islam who was said to have also consid-
ered Christianity] used to serve. There is a vast difference when we consider
the phrase “Who say we are Christians” that they misnamed themselves.72

It is up to the modern Muslim interpreter to tease out such differences

and make them known, lest the same phenomenon should occur inter-
nally. Thinking about the other, once again, becomes one of the primary
vehicles to think about oneself and one’s own community. Al-Jā i subse-
quently warns Muslims from trusting Christians. Indeed, this is part of
the larger trope in this literature to avoid forming friendships with Jews or
Christians. According to Al-Jā i , though Christians may look cleaner and
have professions that are more respectable than Jews, the Christian male is
actually

inwardly baser, filthier, and fouler; for he does not practice circumcision,
does not cleanse himself from pollution, and in addition eats the flesh of
swine. His wife too is unclean. She does not purify herself from the defile-
ment of menses and childbirth. . . . How indeed can one evade what harms
him, and pursue what profits him if such be his faith? Can such as we have
described set the world aright? Can anyone be more fit to stir up evil and
corruption?73

Social differences that define religious others are always, as we have seen,
connected to religious issues. Othering Christians, or any other religion for
that matter, in a manner that shows them to be not like Muslims then makes
the elucidation of theological and doctrinal differences easier.
For the sake of space and time in what follows, however, allow me
to focus on some of the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328). Like his
predecessors, Ibn Taymiyya argues that what became Christianity bears no
relationship to the teachings of any prophet, and that what today passes for
Christianity is but a set of teachings written much later after the death of
Jesus and only subsequently and retroactively ascribed to him. Behind Ibn
Taymiyya’s criticism of Christianity is his desire to promote God’s absolute
oneness (taw īd).
 Making Christians 139

We witness this on clear display in his al-Jawāb al- a ī li-man baddala dīn
al-masī (“The Correct Answer to Those Who Changed Christ’s Religion”).74
Though the text is an ostensible written response to one Paul of Antioch who
had written a treatise critical of Islam’s universal applicability and in defense
of trinitarianism,75 it quickly becomes much more than this. Ibn Taymiyya
subsequently provides an often technical discussion on the nature of the re-
lationship between God and the universe, in addition to a broad-ranging cri-
tique of Muslim sects (e.g., Sufism, Shī ism, and others who go on pilgrimages
to the shrines of saints) that parallel Christianity’s errors.76 Islam, in other
words, is in danger of becoming like Christianity since Christianity had orig-
inally been Islam. Ibn Taymiyya’s goal was to prevent another Christianity
from developing within the heart of his own religion. Christianity offers Ibn
Taymiyya with a startling example of what happens when a community, orig-
inally blessed with prophecy and divine revelation, is left to its own devices.
In the introduction to the work, for example, Ibn Taymiyya draws a series
of connections between Christians on the one hand, and those in his own
community who seek to innovate on the other. Indeed, he informs the reader
that this is one of the main reasons behind his desire to compose the work:

From an understanding of the real nature of the religion of the Christians

and its falsity there can also be known the falsity of those views that re-
semble theirs—that is, the views of the perpetrators of apostasy and inno-
vation. When the light of the faith and the Qur ān arrives, God destroys that
which opposes him. He said, “Truth has come and falsehood has vanished
away. Falsehood is ever bound to vanish” [Q 17/81]. God has made clear
the good and superior qualities of truth whereby it became established as
true.77

Among other things, Ibn Taymiyya uses his critique of Christianity in

general and Christian belief in particular as a way to work out the correct
relationship in Islamic thought between God’s immanence and his tran-
scendence.78 What is most disturbing to him is the fact that in the scriptures
that Jews and Christians possess there is nothing to lead the believer to an
acceptance of Muhammad as the true prophet and Islam as the true religion.
Whereas Paul of Antioch had criticized the universality of Muhammad’s
message, Ibn Taymiyya counters—replete with extensive qur ānic evi-
dence—that Jews and Christians are guilty of unbelief (kufr).79 In terms of
Christianity, he writes, it is a religion full of innovation (bida ):
140 Subsequent Constructions

Christ did not ordain for you the Trinity, nor your thinking on the divine
persons, nor your doctrine that he is Lord of the Universe. He did not pre-
scribe for you that you make pork and other forbidden things permissible.
He never commanded you to omit circumcision, or that you should pray to
the east; nor that you should take your great men and monks as masters be-
side God. He did not tell you to commit idolatry [shirk] by using statues and
the cross, or by praying to the dead or absent prophets and holy men telling
them your needs. He did not prescribe monasticism or the other reprehen-
sible practices which you innovated. Christ never ordained such things for
you, nor is what you follow the Law you received from the messengers of
Christ.80

Here Ibn Taymiyya criticizes Christianity for innovating Jewish custom,

even though, of course, he would also say that such Jewish customs them-
selves represent a set of innovations (from an originary Islam). For ex-
ample, Christianity’s removal of circumcision, dietary laws, and other such
features shows clearly where the religion innovates from previous practice.
Whereas Jews go too far in their religious observances, Christians do not
go far enough. The perfect balance, of course, is what they both originally
were: Islam. By showing the deficiencies of Christianity—and, by extension,
Judaism—Ibn Taymiyya, like other normative Sunnī thinkers, articulates the
benefits of Islam.
Ibn Taymiyya joins a long list of other thinkers, including philosophers,81
who sought to refute Christianity—especially the doctrine of the trinity—for
the further articulation of Islam.82 Only by exposing the weaknesses in other
religious traditions is it possible, simultaneously, to prevent such weaknesses
in Islam and in the process show how Islam is what they are not. It is fitting
to end this discussion with the al-Jawāb al- a ī , since in it, Ibn Taymiyya
reserves even more venom for internal enemies, most notably the Shī a, who
will form the centerpiece of the following chapter.

* * *
The present chapter has sought to expand some of the categories brought
up in the context of the previous one by showing how the anxiety over re-
ligious others carried into some of the larger legal and social frameworks
that the early Muslims inherited. Like Jews, Christians posed a real existen-
tial problem to the expanding umma, and this created all sorts of pressures
to differentiate Islam and Muslims from Christians and Christianity. This
 Making Christians 141

was made both more difficult and even more necessary by virtue of the fact
that so many converts to the new religions came from erstwhile Christian
communities. This meant that those responsible for mass conversions—
preachers, mystics, lay theologians, and the like—needed to explain Islam
in a manner that they could understand. In addition to drawing upon folk
customs and local lore, the main focus of this chapter has revolved around
showing how the New Testament was a corrupt text on account of its faulty
Christology. It was the Qur ān and Islam, in other words, that represented
the original teachings of Christianity. The teachings of the latter had been
excised or transformed on account of Jewish trickery. Those moments or
doctrines where Christianity went wrong, at least according to the nar-
rative that Muslim thinkers manufactured for it, was the direct result of
Jewish malfeasance. Muslims, in other words, are warned not to become
like Christians, who are held up as the example par excellence of what
happens when a community loses sight of its divine mandate.
Just as great as the theological and social anxiety that Christians and
Christianity posed for the new religion, this chapter has also argued that
numerous legal and imperial structures aided in the rise of a Muslim em-
pire. Islam, in other words, inherited an episteme that divided the world into
discrete religions—the same discrete religions that were subsequently back-
projected onto the earliest period—and which was further predicated on
an orthodox/heterodox binary. This binary, I have suggested, played a large
role in encouraging an emerging class of what would eventually emerge as
Sunnī theologians to think about themselves and their version of Islam as
orthodox, and all those that did not live up to the same criteria as heterodox.
This will become even clearer in the following chapter wherein the Shī a are
discussed in greater detail.
Christianity and Judaism, perhaps more than any other religions, provided
the raw materials—theological, legal, political, and material—that were di-
rectly responsible for the creation and maintenance of a Muslim empire. As
Christians became Muslims and as Islam spread into the political vacuum
left behind by the fall of Christian empires, the onus fell on the framers of
Islam to wrestle with this heritage. For this reason, they expended much en-
ergy in showing where, when, and why Christianity—not unlike Judaism be-
fore it—went astray.
 6
Shī a
The Other Within

Beware of these misleading beliefs! The worst of those are the

Rāfi a’s, for they are the Jews of this community, and they loathe
Islam, just as Jews despise Christianity.1

Streams of blood and, what is perhaps more important, streams of

ink, representing the mental energy of the best and noblest in Islam,
were shed to defend or reject the claims of the Alids.2

Islam’s first decades were marred by disagreement and dissent that not co-
incidentally coincided with the death of the Prophet. Debates over who
should succeed Muhammad as the political and spiritual leader of the young
community led to the beginnings of what would soon become a highly sec-
tarian milieu with the subsequent internecine strife witnessing, among other
things, the assassination of three of the four rashidūn. Such strife, located and
personified by later commentators in figures such as the Jew Abdallāh ibn
al-Saba , was responsible for the production of a set of competing narratives
over what individual and/or group could claim the most authentic relation-
ship to Muhammad’s religious and political mantle. Though these narratives
were frequently written much later than the events upon which they pur-
port to comment, such sources are nonetheless relevant to my study since
they show, once again, how later Muslims sought to entrench their positions
onto the earliest period. They did this, moreover, by taking their own ideas
and concerns and then putting them onto the period in question in such a
way as to legitimate themselves and to diminish or repudiate rivals. The dis-
crete groups of subsequent centuries, created in any number of competing
presents, were then inserted back into a distant past. If previous chapters

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0007
 Shī a 143

witnessed the creation of essentialized Jews and Christians and their back-
projection to make room for the clarification and articulation of Islam, the
present one shows how later discourses of intra-Islamic orthodoxy and het-
erodoxy, and of inclusion and exclusion, were also imagined to exist in this
earliest period.
This problematic nature of our sources for the earliest period, as Henri
Lauzière remarks, means that we are often “taught to superimpose [later]
concepts on the history of Islamic thought without truly questioning [their]
provenance of authenticity.”3 Such an imposition means that literary sources,
as we have seen time and again, are often mistaken for historical ones.4 This
confusion creates an idealized and often highly partisan account of the way
things should have been. This, in turn, leads to an artificial simplicity and a
categorical tidiness that is superimposed upon the past’s complexity.5 Such
anachronism not infrequently means that Sunnī sources tend to be accepted
at face value and as normative despite the existence of other sources that re-
veal different literary narratives and historical situations. Yet, it is precisely
these other sources, if and when they are consulted, that are the ones imag-
ined as being somehow partisan or as historically one-sided.6
In this chapter we shall see, once again, how the community that constructs
itself in the image of normativity and as the embodiment of orthodoxy
thinks about others as a way to think about itself. Only now the focus will not
be on religious others per se, but on the major sectarian division internal to
the tradition, namely, the Shī a. While there exist many subdenominations
within Shī ism—Shahrastānī, for example, lists twenty-five groups divided
under five separate rubrics—for the sake of convenience I lump them all to-
gether simply as “the Shī a” for no other reason that, in the main, this is how
the Sunnī tradition tends to think of and with them. While a heresiographer
like Shahrastānī might well have been interested in documenting the types
of Shī a in existence, whether in reality or theoretically, the fact of the matter
is that the vast majority of Sunnī polemicists were simply interested in a ge-
neric “Shī a,” who are frequently lumped together using the pejorative mon-
iker of al-rāfi a (pl. rawāfi ; lit. “rejectors”).
As with previous chapters, we see how the discourses that produce “the
Shī a” are not about actual Shī īs so much as they are about those doing the
framing and production of such discourses. Like Jews and like Christians,
the Shī a function as a foil that allowed the Sunnī majority to imagine itself,
and bring itself into existence, using an intricate and frequently elaborate di-
alectic of comparison and contrast. If the Shī a, for example, locate religious
144 Subsequent Constructions

and political authority in the Imāmate—which is predicated on each Imām’s

infallibility, omniscience, and ability to designate explicitly his successor—
Sunnī thinkers sought to construct a counternarrative of authority grounded
in a communal consensus that emerges from a literal reading of the Qur ān
and the Sunna. However, when we assume—as too many of our primary and
secondary literatures do—that the Sunnī tradition is simply normative and
that the Shī a somehow “fell off ” or “parted ways” from it, we fundamentally
misunderstand our sources and, just as importantly, the historical record
that produced them. Indeed, the basic Sunnī-centric narrative maintains that
Alī willingly assented to Abū Bakr’s leadership and all was good with the
young community until the aforementioned Abdallāh ibn Saba , the perfid-
ious Jew from San ā , began to cause problems during the time of the third
caliph Uthmān by spreading extremist views about the divinity of Alī.
If anything, Shī ism shows Sunnī Islam to be historically contingent and
neither more nor less authentic than any other branch of Islam. Our par-
adigm for “Islam” thus needs to move toward one in which we realize that
we cannot know effectively about the Qur ān, adīth, kalām, and all other
topics of Muslim learning without studying the various Shī ī, Ibā ī, Jewish,
Christian, and other cognate literatures. The category (Sunnī) Islam thus
needs to be seen as a contingent development of Muhammad’s preaching
rather than its necessary historical outcome. It is this latter sense of inev-
itability, however, that is most customarily portrayed. If and when such
minoritarian traditions are discussed, they tend to be examined in ways that
resemble the ancient categories associated with heresiographical and other
polemical literature. My goal here, however, is to show how Sunnī thinkers
further articulated their position of orthodoxy by using the Shī a as their in-
ternal other. Before I do this, however, allow me to turn briefly to the de-
fining moment that would, at least in retrospect, function as the catalyst of
the Sunnī-Shī ī split.

Counternarratives

Upon Muhammad’s death in 11/632, so the basic (Sunnī) narrative goes,7

some of his followers met at the Portico (saqīfa) of the Banu Sa ida, a tribe
from Medina, to discuss the issue of the fledgling umma’s leadership. There,
Abu Bakr, who, as later pro-Shī ī historians note, came from a relatively insig-
nificant clan within the Quraysh tribe, emerged as the first caliph or successor
 Shī a 145

to the Prophet. Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Alī, who came from
the Prophet’s own clan, the Banū Hāshim, was—again according to these
later sources—largely overlooked in the process. We are also informed that
Alī was the first male to embrace Muhammad’s message.8 Since Alī was part
of Muhammad’s prestigious clan and as such, especially given the unwritten
rules in a heavily tribal culture, had the right to emerge as the true successor,
these sources ask, why would he not assume the mantle of the Prophet? They
answer this question by claiming that he was actively prevented from so doing.
Thus began the first of what would later be perceived to be a set of in-
cessant slights to deprive the most capable and deserving person—and
his descendants—of the caliphate. Both Shī ī and Sunnī sources agree that
after the events at the Portico, a crowd of men marched to Alī’s house and
demanded that he swear allegiance to Abu Bakr, the new caliph. The situa-
tion would have turned violent if not for the intercession of Fā imah, Alī’s
wife and Muhammad’s daughter, whom later pro- Shī ī sources say was in-
jured and miscarried a grandchild of the Prophet in the process, an injury
from which she would ultimately die.9
According to the later Shī ī tradition, “saqīfa heralds karbalā.” Implicit
in this locution is the notion that the misdeeds and nefarious intentions of
those who denied the transfer of power to Alī at the portico would lead di-
rectly to the murder of his son (and Muhammad’s grandson), usayn, on
the plains of Karbalā in 61/680.10 We witness this—again, clearly from a pro-
Alīd perspective—in the Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays, which the later Shī ī tradi-
tion ascribes to Sulaym b. Qays al-Hilālī, a disciple of Alī, the first Imām,
and which purports to provide an eyewitness account of the events that tran-
spired at the Portico and immediately thereafter. In the following account,
Abū Bakr goes to the house of al- Abbās b. Abd al-Mu alib, Muhammad’s
uncle, to ensure that the latter will give him his oath of allegiance. Abū Bakr
informs him that when God

called [Muhammad] to Him, He left people free to choose what is best for
them, in unity, not in separation. And so the people have chosen me as its
leader and responsible authority, and I have accepted. With God’s help, I fear
no weakness, no hesitation, no anguish. Even so, I have been informed that
I have an opponent [i.e., Alī] who denounces me and goes against the will
of the people. He relies on your authority [you, the Prophet’s Family], and
you have become the guarantee of his safety and respectability. Now, you
must either realign yourselves with the will of the people or dissuade him
146 Subsequent Constructions

from going back on his decision. We have come to you to propose to you,
to both you and your descendants, a part in this matter [the caliphate], for
you are the uncle of the Messenger of God. We grant you this favor despite
the fact that the people, aware of your rank and the rank of your companion
[ Alī], want no part of you.11

The “Will of the People,” which would become enshrined as norma-

tive in the subsequent Sunnī tradition, is here contrasted with that of the
wishes and desires of the family of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt). In the Portico’s
shadow, then, we witness what will continue, until the present, to be a set of
contested narratives concerning which of these two points of view—the one
that envisages leadership to occur solely within the family of the Prophet or
the one that promotes the election of a caliph12—represents the most legiti-
mate form of Islam and the one that is believed to coincide most closely with
Muhammad’s will.
According to the Sunnī tradition, the qur ānic narrative was compiled by
a council of scholars during the reign of Uthmān (r. 23/644–35/656), the
third of the rashidūn caliphs. Other recensions were destroyed and replaced
by this official version. At the same time, again according to this narrative,
all prophetic reports (a ādīth) were examined critically and those deemed
as authentic were separated from those regarded as inauthentic. From these
two sources, the Qur ān and adīth, emerged the entire infrastructure that
would pave the way for the emergence of the Sunnī tradition in the coming
centuries.
Parallel to this narrative, however, there exists another one that claims
that Muhammad explicitly designated Alī as his legitimate successor.
According to this account, in the words of Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi,
“the original and integral Qur an, containing numerous explicit mentions
and clear allusions to the members of Muhammad’s family and, in particular
presenting Alī as his successor, was falsified, heavily censored, and funda-
mentally altered by Alī’s enemies who usurped power upon the death of the
Prophet.”13 This narrative maintains that the normative Sunnī position, be-
ginning as early as the century after Muhammad, sought to excise the Shī ī
narrative and erase all those parts of the tradition that supported the claim
that Alī and his descendants were destined to rule the umma. This coincides
further with the Shī ī narrative that the Sunnīs tampered (ta rīf) with the
Qur ān in such a manner that they removed all those references to Fā ima,
 Shī a 147

Alī, asan, and usayn (the so-called ahl al-bayt)—all of which remain in a
hidden Qur ān that will be revealed at the end of times.14
It is, as should be clear, the first of these two narratives that would go on
to become normative in Sunnī circles and even the modern academic study
of Islam, which tends to simply replicate it with few questions asked. Despite
what is clearly a political process, Sunnī thinkers, indeed like the theologians
of all religious traditions, maintain that their normativity is instead natural
and inevitable. For the same reason, these theologians obsess with showing
the errors of others’ ways, especially of those that are closest to them. This
gave way to the genre of literature, one encountered in previous chapters,
known as heresiology wherein Sunnī thinkers sought to elaborate upon the
misbeliefs, incorrect beliefs, and outright heresies of others. Lurking in the
background and supporting the entire edifice of the Islamic heresiographical
tradition is the utterance, attributed to Muhammad, that effectively says that
the community will be divided into seventy-three sects, only one of which
will go to paradise.15
Subsequent writers take this report to be axiomatic and subsequently at-
tempt to provide a detailed record all seventy-three sects.16 We see this, for
example, in al-Baghdādī’s (d. 429/1037) Kitāb al-farq bayn al-firaq (“Book
of Schisms”) that uses this adīth as an occasion to list all of the seventy-
two “misguided” sects.17 The work ends with an elaboration of the tenets of
orthodox Sunnī Islam. Therein we read, for example, that the Shī a “do not
accept as authentic anything which has come down by tradition on the au-
thority of the Companions regarding the precepts of the law . . . for they re-
frain from accepting traditions of the adīth and the lives of the prophets and
their heroic deeds on account of their brandings as infidels their authors.”18
The structure of al-Baghdādī’s text is surely significant: The principles of or-
thodoxy can only be articulated after the heterodox and heretical beliefs of
others have been elaborated in full. This clears the space to elaborate “nor-
mative” belief and praxis. Others, such as Shahrastānī (d. 545/1153), whom
I shall discuss in the following section, often went outside of the Islamic tradi-
tion to include Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian sects in their numerations.
Yet others, such as al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), will expand the number when
he writes that “the Rawāfi number three hundred sects, of which twenty are
well known.”19 Many of these sects that al-Maqrīzī lists would seem not to
have any reality beyond the name that he provides to them. Needless to say,
such enumerations reveal as much about what Sunnī thinkers thought the
148 Subsequent Constructions

Shī a were up to and what they did than anything that resembled what they
actually believed or practiced.

Ibn azm and the Ongoing Quest for Normativity

Ibn azm (d. 456/1064), whom we have already encountered in chapter 4,

was an Andalusī polymath and a leading proponent of the āhirī school of
Islamic thought.20 The latter emphasized the outward ( āhir) interpreta-
tion of the tradition and stressed the importance of three sources of Islamic
law: the Qur ān, the adīth, and consensus (ijmā ) of the Muslim commu-
nity.21 Reading these texts literally, he argues, shows that many of the cen-
tral tenets of the Shī a—such as the Imāmate, the explicit designation of the
previous Imām for his successor (na ), and an esoteric interpretation of the
Qur ān (ta wīl)—are all later innovations on the part of Shī ī thinkers.22 Such
practices and beliefs go against, to return us to the Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays,
what Abū Bakr informed al- Abbās b. Abd al-Mu alib was the “will of the
people.”
Ibn azm finds that a literal reading of such authoritative texts, not sur-
prisingly, reveals that it is the ahl al-sunna that clearly offers the correct and
most—or, perhaps better, only—authentic reading of Muhammad’s mes-
sage. It is apposite in the present context to cite Israel Friedlaender’s impor-
tant 1907 study, wherein he remarked, using the same quotation with which
I opened this chapter, that “streams of blood and, what is perhaps more
important, streams of ink, representing the mental energy of the best and
noblest in Islam, were shed to defend or reject the claims of the Alids.”23 I cer-
tainly concur with his larger assessment that Sunnī thinkers were (and indeed
still are) obsessed with the Shī a, and that the former frequently sought to
categorize them into “large numbers of sects with a peculiar, often grotesque
mixture of extremely heterogenous elements.”24 At the risk of repeating my-
self, orthodoxy demands heterodoxy for its expression and subsequent elab-
oration. It is decidedly not the case that orthodoxy, in this case the Sunnī
tradition, accrues naturally or organically to some authentic version of Islam
that exists somewhere in the ether. On the contrary, orthodoxy emerges only
slowly through a process of elaboration that involves the shedding of beliefs
and practices that are only after the fact deemed problematic. This is not so
much a religious project, but a political one—one wherein the religious un-
derstanding of the dominant group imposes itself and its will on the majority
 Shī a 149

by political fiat. In articulating and enforcing orthodoxy, in other words,

there need to be minoritarian groups that can be used to juxtapose “correct”
forms of the tradition.
There was a tendency, as witnessed previously, for heresiologists to base
their taxonomies on the adīth attributed to Muhammad that Islam would
be divided into seventy-three sects. Unlike other heresiologists, Ibn azm
was less interested in using this adīth as the justification to recount and
document the errors of these seventy-three sects. In fact, nowhere does he
even mention this adīth. Instead, he uses his Kitāb al-fi al fī l-milal wa-l-
ahwā wa-l-ni al25 to recount the various sectarian divisions of Islam into
five general rubrics: (1) the ahl al-sunna, which are no sect at all but represent
the true and authentic Islam; this is then followed by providing an exami-
nation of numerous “sects,” the major ones being (2) the Mu tazila,26 (3) the
Murji a,27 (4), the Shī a, and (5) the Khawārij (the Kharijites).28 All are, in
turn, subdivided, with the main criterion being which groups among each
are “the nearest to (akrab) the ahl al-sunna.”29 Lest there be confusion, Ibn
azm states boldly that “the adherents of the ahl al-sunna are considered the
people of Truth [ahl al- aqq] while all others are the people of innovation
[ahl al-bid a].”30 It is only the Sunnī tradition, in other words, that walks in
the footsteps of Muhammad and his companions (al- a āba).
The Shī a differ from the others—including, and most importantly, for Ibn
azm—in “their discussion surrounding the Imāmate and the degrees of
excellence among the companions of the prophet [kalāmahum fī al-imāma
wa l-mufā ala bayna a āb al-nabī].”31 As we have seen so many times,
whenever heterodox beliefs arise, a foreign contagion must be isolated and
held up as responsible for their introduction into the heart of Islam. In this
case, Ibn azm blames the Persians for the proliferation of Shī ī tendencies.
This was a pretense, he argues, and they did this with the aim of “condemning
the injustice [istishanā ulm] done to Alī and his family” in order to “lead
them astray from Islam [ikhrajūhum an al-islām].”32 Into this group, Ibn
azm puts the “cursed” Jew Abdallāh ibn Saba , whom, like the Persians, he
accuses of adopting Islam only outwardly so as to instill division among his
coreligionists.
To carve out intellectual space for what is supposed to be the appropriate
relationship that one ought to have with the Prophet and the a āba, of
course, Ibn azm has to list, in detail, all those positions that he, and the
Sunnī tradition of which he is a part, imagines to be incorrect. No group,
according to him, misunderstands the nature of prophecy and misconstrues
150 Subsequent Constructions

the straight path as designated by the ahl al-sunna more than the Shī a. He
writes, “Oh Servants of God, fear God in your souls and do not be seduced
by the infidels and heretics [ahl al-kufr wa l-il ād] or those who embellish
their words not with logical proofs but with forgeries and who advise you
contrary to that which is found in the Book of your Lord and the word of
your Prophet. There is no good except in these two.”33 The Qur ān and adīth,
he makes clear in this passage, function as the foundation stone of all proper
Islamic belief. Any tradition or belief that strays from these two foundational
sources—and their correct and normative interpretations—are, by nature
and by definition, heretical. Lest the reader is uncertain, Ibn azm defines
clearly what he means by correct belief. Unlike the Shī a, for example, proper
(Sunnī) belief consists of knowing

that the religion of Allah is literal [ āhir], with no hidden meanings [bā in]
in it; public [jahr] and not secretive [sirr]; it is all based on logical proof
[burhān] and there is nothing indulgent [musāma a] in it. Suspect eve-
ryone who calls on you to follow him without proof and everyone who
claims for religion either secrecy or a hidden meaning. All claims are
nothing but presumptions and lies. Know that the Apostle of God did not
conceal even as much as a single word of the Law [sharī a], nor did he allow
those closest to him—his wife, his daughter, uncle or cousin on his father’s
side, or any of his companions—access to anything about the Law that he
would not have held back from the humblest shepherds. The Prophet did
not keep to himself any secret or allusion or any kind of hidden explana-
tion, besides the message that he brought to all of humanity.34

Here, Ibn azm warns the ahl al-sunna to be wary of the Shī ī claim that
the full and proper understanding of the tradition—of the Qur ān, adīth,
the sharī a, and so on—resides only in a handful of religious specialists who
interpret the will of the occulted Imām. Such interpretation, he intimates, is
not transparent to all and sundry. It is, in other words, bā in (“hidden”), the
polar opposite of that which is constructed as literal. Instead, he argues that
such knowledge has to be accessible to all Muslims, to the entire umma, and
in such a manner that the literal level of such texts is neither subverted nor
otherwise compromised. He who holds the view of the Shī a, he concludes, is
not just a heterodox Muslim, but an actual apostate (kāfir). Salvation comes
not from the divinely guided Shī ī Imāms, whose wills are only made known
through channels of secrecy, but through the official and transparent texts of
 Shī a 151

the Sunnī tradition: the Qur an, reliable adīth reports, and those qualified to
interpret them as designated by the ahl al-sunna.35
Ibn azm, and he is certainly not unique in this regard, can only articulate
what he considers to be correct belief by listing incorrect beliefs. The differ-
ence with the Shī a, however, is that they consider themselves to be Muslims
and, for the most part, use most of the same sources designated as normative
by the ahl al-sunna. Their interpretation, in other words, is incorrect, and
this is why the Shī a prove to be so dangerous and potentially subversive, and
why so much energy has to be expended showing just how and where their
beliefs and doctrines are incorrect. While he certainly mentions the relation-
ship between Abdallāh ibn Saba , the Jews, and the Shī a, it is a relationship
that will increasingly receive greater attention among heresiologists and
other theologians in subsequent generations. Before I describe that relation-
ship in greater detail, however, allow me to examine another attempt to use
the Shī a to help articulate Sunnī orthodoxy. Al-Shahrastānī offers a different
approach than Ibn azm in the sense that, while less overtly hostile to non-
normative and minoritarian traditions,36 he nevertheless still works with a
paradigm that divides the world into proper belief and improper belief, be-
tween orthodoxy and heresy, and between normativity and non-normativity.

Al-Shahrastānī and the Science of Otherness

Al-Shahrastānī, as witnessed in chapter 4, takes a much less caustic and po-

lemical tone when dealing with the religious beliefs and practices of others.
The goal that he sets for himself, instead, as he puts it in the opening of his
K. al-milal wa l-ni al, is to

impose upon myself the obligation to present the view of each sect as I find
them in their works without favor or prejudice, without declaring which are
correct and which are incorrect, which are true and which are false. Surely
the glimpses of truth and the odor of falsehood will not go undetected by
minds versed in intellectual matters.37

While he ostensibly takes a hands-off approach to judging other sects, un-

like, for example, Ibn azm, the recounting of heresies can never just be an
avocation. It is a legal, political, and religious endeavor with a host of prac-
tical consequences. Built into the genre—and by definition Shahrastānī’s
152 Subsequent Constructions

K. al-milal wa l-ni al is a work of heresiography—is the temporal distance

between the authors and the sects with which they deal, not to mention the
fact that sects are always mediated through the categories supplied by the tra-
dition that the author imagines as normative. Other religions and “sects” are
defined, not surprisingly, in terms of their perceived proximity or distance to
orthodoxy. All of this, of course, is in addition to the highly schematized or-
ganization of individual works, including the inevitable biases of the authors
in question.38 In this, Shahrastānī is certainly no different than the likes of
Ibn azm, and the goal of both, as it is of heresiologists more generally, is
to document the incorrect beliefs of others, which he believes to be “mis-
guided” (al- ālal). In the introduction of the work, he further remarks:

The Prophet compared each of the misguided sects [al-farqa al-

ālal] of his umma with misguided people of former times. Thus, he
said, “the Qadariyya are the Majus of this umma, the Mushabbiha
[anthropomorphists] are the Jews, and the Shī a are its Christians.”
Speaking in general terms, he said, “You walk along the path of former
peoples in exactly the same way, so much so that if they have entered the
hole of a lizard, you will enter it too.”39

Here Shahrastānī sets out his goals: to present the beliefs of others in
order to make clear the nature of sectarian difference, to show how others
deviate from the Sunna of Islam, and to show how contemporary heresies re-
semble those of previous times. It is interesting to note that whereas the sub-
sequent heresiographical tradition will compare the Shī a to Judaism, here
Shahrastānī compares the former to Christianity. This may well be the result
of his supposed Shī ī leanings;40 regardless, I mention him in the present con-
text to show how even a more balanced account of other religions and other
sects still retains an implicit bias and a lodestar against which these others
must be juxtaposed and with which they must ultimately be compared. Even
if Shahrastānī were an Ismā īlī, for example, he nevertheless presents Shī ism,
and by extension Ismā īlism, as falling short of the mark of what he, at least
on the surface level, imagines as Islamically normative.
Even an approach that is, by all accounts, supposed to be more “objective”
and “balanced” nonetheless betrays a certain structure—one inherent to the
genre of heresiology—that privileges and denies. More often than not, this
involves taking and presenting the Sunnī tradition as somehow normative.41
In his section devoted to the various subdivisions of the Shī a, he begins
 Shī a 153

simply enough with a general description before going on to provide both a

taxonomy and a survey of its subsects. In the most general terms, according
to him:

The Shī a are those who follow Alī only. They say that his Imāmate and
his caliphate are based on designation [na ] and appointment [wa iyya],
whether open [jalīy] or hidden [kafīy]. They also maintain that the Imāmate
must remain in Alī’s family. If it were to go outside of it, this would be be-
cause of a wrong on the part of another or because of dissimulation [taqiyya]
on the part of the rightful Imām. They say that the Imāmate is not a legal
matter [qa iyya ma la a], settled by people by their own choosing. It is in-
stead a fundamental and basic element of their religion. Messengers of God
may neither ignore nor disregard it, nor leave it to the choice of the common
people.42

For Shahrastānī, the Shī a differ from the ahl al-sunna in the sense that
the latter takes the ostensible will of the people into consideration when it
comes to legal matters. The Shī a, by contrast, base their legal positions on
the teachings of the Imāms, which by definition are not transparent to the
larger community of believers. After such a general assessment, Shahrastānī
moves on to an examination of the individual sects that compose the Shī a.
Most germane for my argument here is his discussion of Twelver Shī ism. Of
particular interest to him is the institution of the Imāmate, that which forms
the foundation stone of Shī ism, and upon which all other teachings and
doctrines are built. In particular, Shahrastānī focuses on the issue of succes-
sion, the principle whereby one Imām explicitly designates his successor. He
notes matter-of-factly how each new succession necessarily creates a number
of issues for the community, especially when it comes to disagreements over
whom the actual successor should be. According to him:

Among the Shī a there were those who believed in the Imāmate of A mad
b. Mūsā b. Ja far instead of his brother Alī al-Ri a. Those who followed
Alī al-Ri a doubted at first the Imāmate of his son, Muhammad, because
when Alī died Muhammad was still too young, was unfit to be the Imām,
and was unfamiliar with the ways of the Imāmate. A number of people
held to his Imāmate but quarreled among themselves at his death with
some believing in the Imāmate of his son Mūsā and others in that of his
other son Alī.43
154 Subsequent Constructions

Implicit in this, though not nearly to the same extent as Ibn azm, is a crit-
icism of the ostensible lack of transparency on the part of the Shī a leader-
ship. Shahrastānī implies that the problems over succession of each Imām
means that the very nature of na , one of the central themes of the Imāmate,
is problematic on account of its lack of clarity, which makes the will of the
Imām difficult to decipher or interpret. Though he does not mention it ex-
plicitly, the further implication is that, unlike the normative Sunnī posi-
tion that is based (at least in theory) on the will of the entire community of
believers, the Imāmate remains a source of confusion and contention. This
is why, he argues, further divisiveness and sectarianism engulf the commu-
nity upon the death of each one of their Imāms. Juxtaposed against this,
the implication is that the ahl al-sunna is able to secure a relatively smooth
transition of leadership since the process of succession is clear on account
of it being laid out in the Sunna. His subsequent discussion of the Shī a is
based on what he perceives to be the confusion that takes place among their
rank-and-file members. He concludes his section on the Twelvers with the
following claim:

They follow closely the Mu tazila in matters of doctrine, but on the ques-
tion of attributes they follow the Mushabbiha, though remaining all the
time confused and bewildered. There is continual strife between their
traditionalists and their rational theologians who charge one another with
unbelief [takfīr]. . . . May God preserve us from this confusion [a āthna
Allāh min al- ayra].44

“Us” here presumably refers to the normative tradition of Sunnism, the tra-
dition that Shahrastānī, regardless of whether it was his own or not, held up as
that to which all others must be compared. Once again, the Shī a are presented
as in disarray, both theologically and politically. They thus appear as a com-
munity that has fallen away from what the Sunnī tradition has constructed as
normative. Moreover, at the end of this quotation, he goes so far as to petition
divine favor that his own community will not become divisive like the Shī a.
Just as Judaism and Christianity function as exemplars of other religious com-
munities that have gone astray, here the Shī a play this role internally.
It should be quite clear that, despite the rhetoric that Shahrastānī provides
ostensible objective accounts of the religions he examines, he is not engaging
in a disinterested comparative or academic study of religion. Or, perhaps
better, if he is engaging in such comparison, then he is, like the majority of
 Shī a 155

nineteenth- and twentieth-century comparativists, holding up one tradition

as a model and then showing how others either conform to or depart from
it.45 Comparison, in other words, is a method that has been greatly abused
over the years to give the construction of one’s truth claims an aura of natu-
ralism, if not universalism.
Shahrastānī, despite his nonpolemical tone, offers just as glaring an ac-
count of others as does someone like Ibn azm or, as we shall see presently,
Ibn Taymiyya. The very structure of the heresiographical treatise demands an
orthodoxy that can be put in counterpoint with a variety of heterodoxies that
are then shown to be wrong. If we are going to call al-Shahrastānī a “compar-
ative religionist” or the world’s first “historian of religion,” we must be fully
aware that his interest in describing others’ incorrect beliefs was not deter-
mined by disinterested scholarship, although intellectual interest and curi-
osity may well have played a role in his endeavor, but ultimately in showing
precisely when, where, and why religious others went astray.

Ibn Taymiyya and the Defense of Literalism

The theologian who was among the most virulently hostile to the Shī a was
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), another Sunnī thinker that we already encoun-
tered briefly in the context of chapter 4. It will be recalled that he was a pro-
ponent of religious reform who supported a return to what he believed was
a literal understanding of the Qur ān and the Sunna, and who wrote polemi-
cally on all those practices that he considered to be un-Islamic, including, but
not limited to, tomb visitations (ziyāra).46 In this, he saw himself as following
in the footsteps of al-salaf al- āli (“the pious ancestors”), namely, the first
three generations of Muslims that included Muhammad and his companions
( a āba).47
He was a prolific writer, so for the sake of convenience I shall focus my
attention primarily on his Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya fī naq kalām al-
Shī a al-Qadariyya (“The Way of the Prophetic Sunna”), a work he composed
in response to Kitāb Minhāj al-karāma fī ma rifa al-imāma (“The Book of the
Way of Dignity on the Knowledge of the Imamate”), a pro-Twelver and anti-
Sunnī polemic written by al- illī (d. 726/1325) for the Mongol leader Öljäytü
(d. 716/1316) after his conversion to Shī ism.48 Ibn Taymiyya’s Minhāj is his
most systematic work dealing with Twelver Shī ism,49 wherein he attempts to
throw the entire project of Twelver Shī ism into doubt. In particular, he raises
156 Subsequent Constructions

questions about the Twelfth Imām and argues that there is little evidence to
support that he even existed. According to him, asan b. Alī al- Askarī, the
eleventh Imām,

had neither offspring [nasl] nor progeny [ aqib]. The Imāmīs who claim
that he had a descendent claim that the latter would have entered the cellar
[sirdāb] in Sāmarrā when he was small. Some among them say he would
have been two years old. Others say three, and yet others opine five years
old. If the child in fact existed, and would have been known, it would have
been obligatory—according to the ruling [ ukm] of God established by the
text of the Qur ān, the Sunna, and consensus [ijmā ]—to have him nursed
[ a ana] by his mother, grandmother or a wet nurse. It also would have
been necessary to have his wealth entrusted to someone else to preserve
it, whether as the legatee [wa ī] of his father if the latter had a legatee or to
someone else, like a relative or deputy of the Sultan. He was an orphan on
account of his father’s death.50

With this passage Ibn Taymiyya provides numerous attempts to under-

mine the Twelfth Imām’s existence. Implicit here is that if this Imām never
existed, then the entire infrastructure of Twelver Shī ism rested upon a fic-
tion. Even if he did exist, Ibn Taymiyya remarks that his upbringing was con-
trary to authentic Islamic teaching that has come down to all of those who are
members of the ahl al-sunna. It is the latter’s teachings, he reminds us, that
provide a set of legal principles based on the normative Islamic sources and
that clearly differ from those offered by the Shī a.
Just to show how polemics move in both directions, it is worth noting
that, in his own polemical account, al- illī had argued that leading Sunnī
scholars—such as Ibn anbal and al-Shāfi ī—had been unduly influenced
by the teachings of Ka b al-A bār, the notorious Jewish convert we have al-
ready encountered several times in this study.51 Since al- illī attacked the
very foundation of orthodoxy—namely, the law and its correct interpreta-
tion, here personified in the form of the great figures of Ibn anbal and al-
Shāfi ī—Ibn Taymiyya continues his attempt to undermine the credibility of
the Twelfth Imām by arguing that, even on the off chance that he did exist,
he certainly did nothing positive for the umma.52 Since no one actually saw
him—the Shī ī tradition has him go into the lesser occultation (al-ghayba al-
ughrā) at the moment of his birth—or presumably met him, Ibn Taymiyya
further argues that
 Shī a 157

none of the objectives [maq ad] of the Imāmate was obtained through him,
nor any of its advantages [ma la a], neither special nor general. If in fact
he is presumed to exist, he constitutes a harm [ arar] for the people of the
earth, with fundamentally no usefulness. Those who believe in him have
not benefitted from him and, through him, no [divine] grace [lutf] or any
other advantage has reached them. As for those who consider his existence a
lie, they will, according to the [Twelvers], be chastised for their considering
him a lie. He is thus a sheer evil, in which there is nothing good, and cre-
ating someone like this is not part of the action of the wise and just God.53

He here argues that the existence of such an individual, while promising

much, delivers very little. The Twelver claim that this Imām exists in a state
of a greater occultation (al-ghayba al-kubra) also makes no sense because it
ascribes super-human qualities to him, something that goes against the nor-
mative Sunnī tradition.54 Whereas al- illī, like any good Shī ī, claims that
Imāmate is one of the true pillars of faith (arkān al-īmān), Ibn Taymiyya
responds with the claim that there is absolutely nothing found in either the
Qur ān or the Sunna to support such a position.55
Ibn Taymiyya further argues that the existence of this last and hidden
Imām in the Twelver tradition is but an invention on the part of later Shī ī
scholars and theologians. Such an Imām, he maintains, would fail to meet
the requirements of the “objectives” (maqāsid) of the Imāmate as defined
by the Shī ī theologians themselves.56 How could someone, he asks, who is
supposed to be perfect and infallible not make life better for his followers?
“If one were making this claim for someone among the companions,”
he writes, “someone who is better known than the two Askarīs [i.e., the
tenth and eleventh Imāms], then this would be more deserving of our
acceptance.”57
While Ibn Taymiyya freely admits that Sunnī political leaders are far from
perfect, he argues that they were at least better for Islam in the long run be-
cause they were able to create a situation in which Islam could flourish, at
least in the political sense of the term. The Shī ī Imāms, on the other hand,
were unable to offer any of this on account of the fact that they possessed nei-
ther political nor military power, despite their putative infallibility, to defend
the umma from attacks by others. Because of this, he reasons that the ma-
jority of Muslims have more confidence in the teachings of (Sunnī) Muslim
scholars than they do in Shī ī scholars who base their rulings on an Imām
that does not exist.
158 Subsequent Constructions

Most reprehensible for Ibn Taymiyya—as indeed for many of the Sunnī
thinkers examined in this chapter—is the Shī ī insistence that their Imāms
possess a special gnosis or knowledge (ma rifa) to interpret not just the
sources of Islam but also the cosmic order. Such a claim is so bothersome
to them because such a gnosis is not knowable to all Muslims, and is in-
stead based on the whims of one particular group.58 Such a special gnosis
furthermore threatens to remove Muslims from a literal reading of the
sources, which of course is one of the hallmarks of the ahl al-sunna. When
this happens, the texts can ultimately be made to say anything that anyone
wants them to say. The Shī a are thus held up as the paradigm for those who
had the truth—in the sense that they had the choice to follow the orthodox
position—but who, for a variety of reasons just recounted, went astray. They
function not just as a reminder of improper belief but also, just as important
(if not more so), as a foil to what proper belief is. They are needed, in other
words, to help articulate clearly the difference between orthodoxy and heter-
odoxy, and between proper and improper belief.
For Ibn Taymiyya, including his students such as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
(d. 751/1350) and Ismā īl ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1303), the Shī a represent one
of the major threats to the umma’s proper belief. They have emphasized
doctrines and beliefs not found in the sources that Sunnīs regard as author-
itative (e.g., the Qur ān and the Sunna) and, in the process, have created and
subsequently elevated others’ doctrines and beliefs to justify their whims.
Whereas Jews and Christians have always struggled since they had never
been in the possession of such sources, their errors at least make sense within
the basic framework that Ibn Taymiyya inherited. The implication, of course,
is that the Shī a should have known better, and should know better. They have
taken what all Muslims have been given but chosen to take that bequest and
interpret it in a manner that does not resemble what Ibn Taymiyya imagines
to be authentic Islam. Ibn Taymiyya, like all those discussed in this study,
works on the assumption that orthodoxy existed at the time of Muhammad
and the companions and that whatever they deemed heterodox or heretical
simply fell off of the “straight path.” They could do this, moreover, because
they were in possession of a narrative that made such groups exist in the ear-
liest period of Islam.
In this regard, Ibn Taymiyya takes his place in the long line of (Sunnī)
Muslim thinkers that used the Shī a as a way to think about orthodoxy and
heterodoxy, about community and difference, and ultimately about them-
selves. The Shī a strayed, according to this narrative, when they insisted that
 Shī a 159

the authoritative structure of Islam ought to be based on birth or genetics as

opposed to those most able to lead the community.59 Indeed, as witnessed in
chapter 4, this often gave rise to the charge that the Shī a represented a Jewish
conspiracy in the heart of Islam.

“The Shī a Are the Jews in Our Midst”

If Jews functioned as the external other par excellence, the Shī a—commonly
referred to by their generic name of al-Rāfi a—become the quintessential
internal other. Both of these groups, Jews and Shī a, become, at least for the
mainstream Sunnī tradition, those who not only repudiate the teachings
and practices of the majority but also actually threaten such teachings and
practices by the very act of their repudiation. As a result, they must be mar-
ginalized, subjected to mistrust and potential violence, yet, at the same time,
they play a necessary and defining role in what would ultimately become
orthodox community formation. Without Jews and Shī is, in other words,
there could quite literally be no Sunnī orthodoxy. Judaism and Shī ism, Jew
and Shī ī, become interchangeable in the Sunnī theological imagination,
functioning as necessary foils that facilitate normative articulations. Sunnī
doctrine and praxis need other doctrines and practices to demonstrate the
difference between proper belief (i.e., their own) and the improper beliefs
of others. This sharp, and admittedly artificial, distinction is responsible for
showing believers the rewards for following normative traditions, and the
social risks and punishments for clinging to false beliefs and practices.
Within this context, Jews and Shī īs play a large role in the Sunnī theolog-
ical imagination, wherein they cohabit as quintessential others. If the latter
functions as the paradigmatic internal other, the former represents the par-
adigmatic external other. Not surprisingly, the discourses used to produce
them are virtually identical to one another, with the characteristic traits of
each frequently overlapping. This finds its fullest expression in the locution
attributed to the famed Kūfan faqī Amir ibn Sharā īl al-Sha bī (d., ca. 103–
110/721–728) that the Shī a “are the Jews of this umma.”60 Al-Sha bī subse-
quently provides a list that shows reprehensible traits that both groups share,
which is preserved in Al- Iqd al-farī 61 of the belles-lettrist Ibn Abd Rabbih
(d. 328/940), also the official panegyrist of the Umayyad Emirate in Cordoba.
The latter, according to Steven M. Wasserstrom, provides us with one of the
earliest sets of lists that would function as the precedent for all subsequent
160 Subsequent Constructions

Sunnī apologetics linking Jew and Shī ī.62 When asked further about his
opinion of Shī a, al-Sha bī cites an account wherein Alī ibn Abī ālib had
put a number of extremists (ghulāt) to death for their desire to transform him
into a divinity. Thereupon, “ Alī ibn Abī ālib burned them [i.e., the Rāfi a]
alive with fire, and he exiled them to (different) lands. Some of those [whom
he exiled were]: Abdallāh ibn Saba , a Jew from San ā , he exiled him to Sābā
(al-Madā in); Abdallāh ibn Yasār, he exiled him to Khāzir.”63 Such sayings
link nicely the Shī a and Jews. It is a Jew, after all, that was held to be respon-
sible for destroying the pristineness of the early umma, just as it was the Jews
who were responsible for corrupting their own religion, in addition to that of
Christianity. This is explicit in the phrasing of Ibn Taymiyya’s claim that “the
Rāfi a wish to ruin the religion of Islam like Paul the son of Joshua, the king
of the Jews, ruined the Christian religion.”64
Shī ism is thus transformed into a Jewish rupture at the very heart of Islam
and only fully makes sense to a Sunnī audience when understood within this
context. The Shī a, like the Jews, operate in bad faith and desire to corrupt
the religion of the majority, be it Christianity in a previous era or Islam in
the current one. It is perhaps also worth mentioning, as Wasserstrom duly
noted close to twenty-five years ago, that such equations only arise in Sunnī
discussions of the Shī a, but not in Sunnī discussions of the Jews.65 Jews, for
example, are never referred to as the Shī a of Christianity. This would seem
to be because Sunnī theology needed “Jews” to make sense of the Shī a—why
else, for example, would the Shī a willingly “depart” from normative Islam
unless they were instigated by someone else to do so—and the Jews were
ready at hand. An earlier heretical movement is needed to explain a modern
heretical one, but not vice versa. For this reason, the Shī a do not seem to
be necessary to place or otherwise make sense of Jews and Jewish heresy—
though such a filiation would most likely have helped the average Muslim to
understand just what is so pernicious about Jewish belief if they thought of it
in terms of Shī ī transgression.
In their quest to ascertain orthodoxy by clearing a space for proper be-
lief after having marginalized those of others, Sunnī theologians-cum-
heresiologists never tired of equating Jews with the Shī a. “The Jews falsified
the Torah,” writes Ibn Taymiyya in his Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya, “just
as the Rāfi a did to the Qur ān.”66 This is but the opening gambit of his sub-
sequent detailed elaboration juxtaposing—or even conflating—Jews and
Shī a. In terms of political authority, for example, we read that “the Jews
say sovereignty is only valid when in the House of David; the Rāfi a say
 Shī a 161

that the Imāmate rightly belongs to the descendants of Ali.”67 At least part
of this linkage is reducible to the shadowy figure of Ibn Saba , who tried to
connect the relationship between Alī and Muhammad to that of Moses
and Joshua.
Here we see how Sunnī heresiologists fixated on the claim of descent,
which, of course, was something that they could not claim for themselves
as the ahl al-sunna was predicated on a different leadership structure. Just
as Jews only acknowledge proper divine supervision through the house of
David, the Shī a do the same through the House of Ali. The ahl al-sunna,
however, are in no need of such claims because the only authority they recog-
nize emerges from the Qur ān, Sunna, and so on. This, in turn, implies other
sets of linkages, such as Ali is to the Prophet Muhammad what Aaron was
to Moses. And just as Aaron’s two sons, Nadab and Abihu, were portrayed
in subsequent rabbinic literature as martyrs who died sanctifying the name
of God, Ali’s two sons, asan and usayn, figure similarly. Implicit in the
Sunnī criticism is that the Shī a follow a biblical model of leadership that is
implicitly, if not actually explicitly, the inverse of the model supplied by the
consensual leadership of the caliphs. The Shī a, in other words, have in place
a model of leadership that has been superseded by other and better forms.
This enables heresiographers to, as it were, kill two birds with one stone.
The Shī a are imagined as “Judaizing” in their tendency of believing in the
Imāmate, just as the Jews are seen as “Shī ī-izing” in their tendency to trace
leadership lineage through bloodlines. Such equations not only make the
Shī a more familiar but also make them more dangerous as they now func-
tion as a symbol of rejection that has always and everywhere posed a threat
to universalism.
Ibn Taymiyya also generates his list equating Jews and the Shī a in the
name of al-Sha bi, who, according to him, said:

Beware of the people of these misleading beliefs, the worst of them being
the Rāfi a. They did not enter Islam of their own desire, nor out of fear [of
God], but rather out of hatred for the people of Islam, in order to commit
outrages against them. [And in a passage just quoted above:] Alī ibn Abī
ālib burned them [i.e., the Rāfi a] alive with fire, and he exiled them
to (different) lands. Some of those [whom he exiled were]: Abdallāh ibn
Saba , a Jew from San ā , he exiled him to Sābā (al-Madā in); Abdallāh ibn
Yasār, he exiled him to Khāzir. This supports the claim that the mihna of the
Rāfi a was the rebellion of the Jews.68
162 Subsequent Constructions

We have now moved from similarities and genetic affinities to perceived

historical connections. The origins of Shī ism are here actually connected
to a Jewish source, Abdallāh ibn Saba , who was metonymically held to be
responsible for undermining the unitary message of Islam. A Muslim sec-
tarian movement, in other words, only makes sense when Jews are behind it.
Why else would any Muslim want to undermine the unity of Muhammad’s
originary and pristine message? If Shī ism now becomes a Jewish conspiracy
to create dissent and havoc within the umma, then Jewish ideas and practices
must be listed and dissected to show just how similar to Shī ism it is.
Ibn Taymiyya further writes that “The Jews sway in prayer; so do the
Rāfi a.”69 Again, the Shī a, but the latest historical iteration of the Rāfi a, and
the Jews, one of the earliest historical iterations of the Rāfi a, share a similar
set of liturgical and ritualistic practices. This further attests to their confla-
tion on the part of those like Ibn Taymiyya, since both similarly reject what
is imagined to be the normativity of both Sunnī teaching and prayer. These
lists, established by such heresiographers, not only refer to theological equa-
tions but also include nontheological items, such as hygiene, diet, and so on.
A final example from the latter includes the following: “The Jews do not eat
eels or tails, neither do the Rāfi a; the Jews do not wipe their shoes, nor do
the Rāfi a.”70
Such cultural equations have a similar, but different, effect. They aim to
show how both groups, as archetypal Muslim and non-Muslim minorities,
are practically—and not just theoretically—similar to one another. In this,
the implication is that theological similarities arise from their similar cul-
tural practices, and, of course, vice versa. And, once again, we see how, in
their equation, Jews take on “Shī ī-izing” tendencies, just as the Shī a take on
“Judaizing” tendencies in such a manner that each one becomes as virulent
as the other, just as both simultaneously, and equally, threaten the (Sunnī)
umma’s unity.

* * *
Comparison of others to oneself, and vice versa, is one of the major ways
that social groups mark out space for themselves and, in the process, define
themselves. We do “x,” for example, whereas others do “y” or “z.” Since we,
whosoever we might be, do x, it must be natural, and y and z must be seen as
somehow abnormal or strange, and ultimately be understood or interpreted
in its light, and as somehow departing from what is normal or just. Why,
for example, is it different? Or, what does it resemble among our beliefs and
 Shī a 163

practices? In this respect, comparison is an attempt to account for the dif-

ferent, the incongruous, and the exotic. It is never, strictly speaking, aca-
demic but more often than not political or ideological. “Something other has
been encountered,” in the words of J. Z. Smith, “and it is surprising either in
its similarity or dissimilarity to what is familiar ‘back home.’ ”71 Comparison,
framed somewhat differently, begins with the acknowledgment of difference
and the simultaneous attempt to overcome it. However, and not infrequently,
the individual engaged in the comparison understands his or her own tradi-
tion to be the normative one or somehow representative of the correct way of
doing things.
As one of the earliest forms of comparative religion, as some want to call
it, heresiology is an activity engaged in the practical work of defining ortho-
doxy (i.e., oneself) by studying and documenting the teachings of various
sects (i.e., others) that had the potential to threaten the status quo. Because
of this, the former could neatly, if subsequently, be written off as “heter-
odox.” In their quest to establish an imagined normativity, heresiologists
and other theologians created, established, and patrolled the bounds of or-
thodoxy, deciding who or what fitted on one side of this boundary line and
who or what could be proscribed as “heterodox” or even “heretical,” and
thus put on the other side. While that which heresiologists practiced and
believed was, not surprisingly, considered to be normative, the practices
and beliefs of those with whom they disagreed for a host of political and
ideological reasons became constructed as non-normative. Heresiologists
and other theologians were, then, ultimately responsible for the defi-
nition of which groups could be located safely within the community of
believers and which ones could not. Prior to such activities on the part of
heresiologists, however, heterodox groups were not surprisingly imagined
as part of the community of believers.
It is worth noting, however, that this use of comparison—perhaps like
comparison in general—is never value neutral or done for its own sake.
Within this context, the heresiologists examined in this chapter certainly en-
gaged in a comparative enterprise, but like the grand comparativists in re-
ligious studies, they worked on a model that invoked essentialized groups.
And, whether they admitted it or not, they used one particular tradition—for
the heresiologists, that of Sunnism, and for modern comparativists, that of
Protestant Christianity—as their model of what a “proper” or “authentic” re-
ligion should be. This was not, even in the case of Shahrastānī, simply an in-
tellectual project.
164 Subsequent Constructions

The Shī a, like the others discussed in this study, present the ahl al-sunna
with a fundamental problem. They are Muslims, but they depart from what
the Sunnī tradition has constructed as normative. They are like Jews and
Christians in this regard, but in many ways worse because they have “de-
parted” from the tradition after Muhammad’s revelation, unlike the others
who had been corrupted prior to it. In this, they are certainly more dan-
gerous. However, in existing after the revelation of the Prophet, they provide
an even more convenient vehicle to help in the generation of what should be
orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
If this and the previous chapters have thought with real, if highly
textualized and stylized, religious others, I now turn to an imagined other, the
so-called zindīq, that is, anyone considered to hold views or follow practices
that are imagined to be contrary to Islamic orthodoxy.
 7
The Amorphous Zindīq

Whoever maintains that the Qur ān is created is an impious zindīq.

One must invite such a person to change the error of his thinking. If
he persists, he must be put to death in the name of the Law.1

The third/ninth century, as we have seen, proved instrumental for the crea-
tion of what would eventually emerge as Islamic orthodoxy. It was a period
that witnessed, among other things, the appearance of those who tried to pre-
serve—if not actively create—the Sunna of the prophet through the collec-
tion of reports (a adith) of things that he was purported to have said or done.
Such reports took their place, along with the Qur ān, as the foundation of
what subsequently crystallized as the Islamic tradition. Various legal schools
(madhāhib; sg. madhhab) then arose to interpret such sources based on, but
not limited to, local custom and tradition.2 It is certainly worth pausing to
appreciate that during this period we quite literally witness the formation of
Islam as the end-product of such forces. It should come as no surprise that
Islam, like all religions, does not appear fully formed, but rather emerges
slowly through a complex process of concentration and rejection. It is also
important in this early period not to imagine a clear-cut distinction between
Sunnism and Shī ism, a polarity that would not emerge for at least another
century—though, as witnessed in the previous chapter, there were certainly
important differences between the two paradigms of leadership that proto-
Sunnī and proto-Shī a positions offered, which reflected the concerns of the
various communities that were beginning to constellate around them. The
third/ninth century, in sum, was a time when Islam was, quite literally, under
construction.
Alterity played a crucial role in this process because others, whether real
or perceived, provided one of the most basic and convenient ways to con-
struct and subsequently test the bounds of community. This can be framed
as simply and matter-of-factly as the locution “us/not-us.” Whether real or

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0008
166 Subsequent Constructions

imagined, or, perhaps better, both real and imagined, the identification and
subsequent definition of religious others—including listing their incorrect
beliefs, their incorrect practices, and so on—would become a regular activity
in the quest to ascertain authority and to delineate orthodoxy. This is why,
as previous chapters have argued, what is imagined as religiously normative
must always be defined, clarified, and refined by arguing against something.
Those tasked with such boundary maintenance included legal scholars,
adīth collectors, doxographers, and others, a group to which the late
Marshall G. S. Hodgson appropriately gave the name “ adīth folk” (ahl al-
adīth).3 These individuals, he argues, “combined with a keen concern for
conservation of what had been achieved a moral rigorism more emotional
than intellectual, which led them into an opposition to the actual cur-
rent conditions among Muslims, in the name of an ideal past. Their tri-
umphant yet populistic piety won them a large popular following, notably
at Baghdad.”4 Christopher Melchert, in trying to give greater definition to
the term, argues that “two salient features of traditionalist piety were unre-
mitting seriousness and an overwhelmingly moralistic conception of the
Islamic community.”5 The latter in particular, to continue using Melchert’s
words, meant that “voluntary membership and equality flow from a stress
on morality, which continually makes the individual choose to do one thing
and not another; it also tends to demand the same choices from all individ-
uals.”6 This growing conception of a unified moral entity, the umma, enabled
the adīth folk to put their own community in increasingly sharp juxtapo-
sition with other communities, which could now be constructed in oppo-
site terms, namely, as not-moralistic. It is within this context of community
formation that previous chapters have examined religious others associated
with rival monotheisms—most notably Jews and Christians—and those in-
ternal others who were imagined as heterodox, to wit, the Shī a. All of these
religious others ultimately functioned as religious competitors, and it was
incumbent upon the adīth folk to show just how, when, and where these
others entered into theological error, all the while simultaneously bringing
themselves and their own beliefs and doctrines into sharper focus.
If previous chapters have focused on real, if artificially constructed, com-
munities, I wish to turn now to a much more amorphous group, yet one that
nevertheless continued to serve the same function, albeit in significantly
different ways. And if previous chapters were concerned with those imag-
ined either to have erred theologically or were perceived as somehow heter-
odox, the present one focuses on a group that is, at least in theory, potentially
 The Amorphous Zindīq 167

much more diabolical, namely, those deemed as “heretical.” The latter, more
so than any of the others discussed in the preceding pages, was perceived to
have gone so far astray from anything even remotely resembling proper be-
lief and, because of this, was imagined to pose a real and existential threat to
the umma’s communal health and spiritual well-being. If previous chapters
examined groups that were imagined as, for the most part, distinct from the
community of believers, “heretics” were imagined to exist at the very heart of
Islam. The more indistinct the category, in other words, the greater the threat
to the body politic.
The zindīq (pl. zanādiqa, though I use the anglicized plural “zindīqs”), to be
defined in greater detail later, were those individuals who were believed to be
nominally Muslim but who subscribed to what were increasingly becoming
nonorthodox practices or beliefs, though it is certainly worth noting that it is
almost impossible to identify any commonly held beliefs that held all of the
individuals—and they tended to be individuals as opposed to a community—
labeled as zindīqs together. Instead, in the words of John P. Turner, the label
tended to be “applied loosely, pejoratively, with intent to malign, and over
time increasingly becomes an expletive.”7 It was a term, as van Ess remarks,
that could be used to designate everything from dualists to libertines, and vir-
tually everything in between.8 Manicheans, poets, philosophers, court secre-
taries, rival theologians, and many others were frequently labeled and even
charged with the crime of zandaqa (“heresy”). In essence, anything or anyone
imagined as hostile to an emerging orthodoxy could be accused of being a
zindīq. More so than those discussed in previous chapters, caliphal authority
seems to have been so concerned with them that it even created an “inquisi-
tion” (mi na, literally, “testing”) with the aim of weeding them out.
Yet, like the others, the zindīq allows us to mine further the outer edges
of orthodoxy by focusing on the fuzzy—and increasingly anxiety-pro-
ducing—border between Islam and non-Islam, the place where differences
were coming into greater doctrinal focus. In this respect the zindīq permitted
the early framers with yet another foil to construct what they considered to
be a pure and authentic Islam at a formative moment in its early develop-
ment.9 Defining the characteristics of what a “heretic” was—both what he
believed in and what he practiced—enabled the creation of what a Muslim
was or should be. If Jews and Christians represented communities who had
the truth but who had been led astray on account of subsequent hubris and
trickery, the zindīq represented someone who never had had such a reve-
lation and who prima facie represented a revolt against all of the virtues
168 Subsequent Constructions

that Islam held dear. Not only do they represent individuals who had never
been part of communities that originally had had access to the truth, but
also they are the individuals who actively work against the authority of re-
vealed scriptures by, among other things, undermining them. The latter can
be witnessed in the frequent charge that zindīqs engaged in the activity of
“parodying the Qur ān” (mu āra a al-Qur ān). The zindīq, in other words,
personified the negation of all that Islam believed in: taw īd (monotheism),
revelation, the creation of the world, prophecy, and corporeal resurrection.
They functioned as the perfect—and, of course, convenient—counterpoint
to all that the framers of Islam were defining as the quintessence of Islam.
We would do well to remember that heretics were never deemed heretical
on account of the fact that they believed or acted differently from the ma-
jority. Such an accusation instead conveniently served the needs of those lev-
eling the charge. Within this larger context, the zindīq was imagined to be so
dangerous because, while ostensibly a Muslim on the outside, underneath his
skin there seethed everything that was imagined to subvert the spiritual and
theological health of the umma. Again, on account of the category’s inherent
fuzziness, any number of competing and contradictory characteristics could
be assigned to it. Zindīqs were blasphemers, they were dualists, they were
poets who threatened the pure language and message of the Qur ān, and
they were also imagined as the ones who endangered the sexual virtues of
Islam. On account of this, the crime, at least in theory, for being a zindīq was
death.10 And, unlike those religious others who were tolerated, the caliph al-
Mahdī (r. 158/775–169/785) set up an office and a magistrate— the ā ib al-
zanādiqa, or alternatively the arīf al-zanādiqa (literally, the “overseer of the
zindīqs” or sometimes translated simply as “inquisitor”)—to begin the pro-
cess of weeding them out of the umma. The zindīq thus allowed the caliph,
at a time when they still styled themselves as the spiritual head of the com-
munity (amīr al-mu minīn), to put an end to perceived religious anarchy in
Iraq and other places in the burgeoning empire.11 The zindīq, in other words,
facilitated the creation of two important distinctions: (1) who was and was
not a Muslim and, since they were not imagined as ahl al-kitāb, (2) who did
and did not count as a member of the ahl al-dhimma.

Zindīq: Toward a Typology

Zindīq, a non-qur ānic term, appears to be a Persian loan-word that entered

Arabic in the eighth century, initially in the narrow sense of a “Manichean.”12
 The Amorphous Zindīq 169

Eventually it came to be used more broadly for a heretic, at which point it

became synonymous and interchangeable with related terms such as mul id
(“apostate,” or “heretic”), murtad (also “apostate”), and kāfir.13 Before I dis-
cuss these latter senses of the term, it is worth noting that Manicheans, un-
like Zoroastrians, were never granted the legal status of ahl al-kitāb.14 This
may well be the result of the fact that The Theodosian Code—which, as I tried
to argue, played a role in the religious worldview that Islam inherited—had
outlawed Manicheanism as heretical. Moreover, as Stroumsa and Stroumsa
note, the first century of Islam seems to have witnessed a renaissance of sorts
of the religion.15 This, according to Lieu, seems to have been the direct re-
sult of the relative tolerance witnessed under the Umayyad caliphs,16 though
such “tolerance” may well have been only indirect as a result of the Umayyad
preoccupation with other matters.17
Manicheans, it is worth noting, and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons
behind their persecution, imagined themselves as the true Christians, ac-
cused other Christians of being “Judaizers,” and styled their prophet, Mani,
as the culmination of prophecy who had brought the true Gospel. Such
features, to reiterate, would certainly have contributed to their harsh treat-
ment within The Theodosian Code, a document that clearly sets out the differ-
ence between orthodoxy and heresy, including the fate that should befall the
latter. According to the bio-bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 380/990), about
whom I shall have more to say later, “Mani asserted that he was the paraclete
[al-fāraqlī ] about whom Jesus, for whom may there be peace, preached.”18
While Manicheans never imagined themselves as representing the true or
even the most authentic Muslims, there was nevertheless fear on the part of
Muslim theologians that Manichaeans would surreptitiously infiltrate the
Muslim community with the aim of undermining it from within by, among
other things, sowing confusion among simple believers.19 Here, we see the
leitmotif that has weaved throughout this study: Religious others, only now
imagined and constructed as zindīqs, threaten by concealing their true iden-
tities with the aim of trickery. Only Manichean trickery is potentially more
dangerous because its goal—unlike, say, that of the Jews or Christians—is
to remove the monotheistic principle, taw īd, from Islam and, by extension,
the world. In this respect both Jews and Christians are at least symbolically, if
problematically, monotheistic.
Since Muslim law denied Manichaeans the status of ahl al-dhimma, they
were ultimately put in the same legal position as all those hostile to Islam and
who were imagined to desire its dissolution. For this reason, according to de
Blois, the word zindīq became dislodged from “Manichean”—if indeed that
170 Subsequent Constructions

was its original intent—and became used interchangeably with mul id.20 The
semantics of the term were now expanded to include anyone who denied
the basic principles of what was slowly coalescing into (orthodox) Islam.
Though an individual Jew, for example, could be accused of being a zindīq,
the Jewish community writ large was never accused of zandaqa. Regardless,
zindīqs played a crucial role in the shaping of orthodoxy because they, more
than anyone, were the ones, especially under the reign of al-Mahdī, imag-
ined to be in possession of all those characteristics opposed to Islam. It was a
convenient charge because, at least in the case of al-Mahdī, their repression
just happened to coincide with his desire to “return” to an Islamic purity that
was associated with the period of Muhammad.21 Zandaqa and Islamic pu-
rity thus came to take on inverse traits of one another. Despite these special
traits, zindīqs joined the Shī a, Jews, Christians, nonassenting theologians,
and a host of others on a continuum that was defined by the characteristics of
“non-Islam” or “subversive to Islam.”22
Many of the theological features associated with zindīqs—dualism, the
denial of God’s existence, that the world was eternal as opposed to created,
determinism, denial of revelation—were not only the antithesis of what
was becoming normative Muslim belief and practice but also actually aided
in the construction of such normativity. It is certainly no coincidence that
Wā il b. Atā (d. 131/748), the founder of the first school of Islamic theology,
the Mu tazila, was said to have written over a thousand questions against
the Manichaeans, thereby reinforcing the notion that in the refutation of
their principles he could sharpen his own.23 Within this latter context, the
“zindīq,” certainly not coincidentally, was instrumental to the rise of Muslim
theology (kalām), whose origins relate to the repudiation of other religions
in the name of clarifying the tenets of Islam.24 According to Patricia Crone,
the existence—perceived as real or otherwise—of zindīqs (and their cognates
dahrīs and mul ids) played a formative role in the development and subse-
quent articulation of Muslim theology, forcing those tasked with its elabo-
ration to provide alternatives to the perceived “ungodly cosmologies” of the
latter.25 Once again we witness just how the existence of and anxiety pro-
duced by religious others—reified, textualized, and easily manipulated—be-
came a convenient foil for the process of the clarification of Islamic doctrine
and practice, and its differentiation from others.
It is also worth mentioning that into the category of “zindīq” could also
be folded so-called freethinkers. These individuals, in the words of Sarah
Stroumsa, “embodied the idea that one can wish to establish a personal
 The Amorphous Zindīq 171

ethical system, organize a human society, or even worship God without

relying on the authority of revealed scriptures.”26 Within this context, it is
certainly worth remarking that one of the most important “freethinkers,” Ibn
al-Rawāndī (d. 298/911), was a student of the Manichean Abū Isā al-Warraq
(d. 383/994).27 What freethinkers or skeptics shared with more classic
zindīqs, qua dualists, was an alternative worldview to that which was shaping
into orthodoxy.

Clarifying the Term: Zindīqs as Manicheans and

the Account of Ibn al-Nadīm

In the first part of the ninth chapter of his Fihrist (“Catalogue”), the tenth-
century Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 380/990), mentioned earlier, devotes consider-
able space recounting information about Manicheans, whom he labels as
Sabians (al- ābi ūn) from arran. Far from polemical, his account actually
provides one of the most thorough from the period. According to him, when
the caliph al-Ma mūn (d. 218/833)—and note that in his account it is not
al-Mahdī—journeyed through the region, he was met by a group of them.
According to al-Nadīm’s description, the caliph subsequently asked them,
“Which of the dhimmī are you?”

They replied, “We are the arnāniyya.” He asked further, “Are you
Christians?” They replied, “No.” “Are you Jews?” “No,” they said. He
inquired further, “Are you Magians?” They answered, “No.” So [al-Ma mūn]
said to them, “Have you a book or a prophet [kitāb aw nabī]?” They were
hesitant in replying to him, so he said, “Then you are unbelievers [kāfirūn],
the slaves of idols, A āb al-Ra s, who lived during the days of my father
[Hārūn] al-Rashīd. As far as you are concerned, it is legitimate [for me] to
shed your blood since there is no contract that establishes you as dhimmi.”
They replied, “we will pay the poll tax [jizya].” To which he responded,
“The poll tax is accepted only from those who do not contradict Islam [min
khālif al-islām] from among those people of religion [ahl al-diyān] that
God, exalted and magnified, mentioned in his Book, and who have a book
of their own, assuring them of good relations with Muslims. Since you do
not belong to one or other of these groups, you must choose one of two
alternatives. Either embrace the religion of Islam, or else that of one of the
religions mentioned in the Book of God. Otherwise I will kill you all. I will
172 Subsequent Constructions

grant you a delay until I return from my journey; then, unless you have
become Muslims or members of religions mentioned in God’s Book, I will
order your death and extermination.”28

Ibn al-Nadīm continues the story by remarking that the entire group de-
cided to change their distinctive dress and appearances, with some becoming
Christians, some Muslims, and others retaining their original religion. Upon
learning of their decision, one of their traditional spiritual leaders suggests
that rather than convert to Islam or to one of the other religions suggested
by al-Ma mūn, they should simply say they were “Sabians,” a religion with
qur ānic precedent but of unclear or uncertain provenance.
With this story we clearly witness the overlap between individuals and/
or groups variously identified as zindīqs, unbelievers, idolaters, and the like.
And again, we should not be surprised to witness qur ānic terms employed as
the primary way to make sense of them. If a group is not mentioned explicitly
in the Qur ān, it and its members must be fitted into one of the rubrics used
therein to designate “unbelievers” (kāfirūn) or “idolaters” (mushrikūn). Or, if
they need to be fitted positively therein, then the equally amorphous qur ānic
term “Sabians” can be invoked. Indeed, al-Bīrūnī (d.440 /1048) makes men-
tion of a thriving Manichaean community in Samarqand, where they were,
significantly, referred to as ābi ūn.29 If anything, the story recounted previ-
ously reflects the confusion that undoubtedly confronted the early Muslims
and the fluidity of groups such as Arameans, Manicheans, Mandaeans, and
the like.
Ibn al-Nadīm’s lengthy and detailed account includes not only a descrip-
tion of Mani’s birth and early life but also often elaborate descriptions of
Manichean beliefs and practices.30 Since my interest here is in the zindīq as a
fluid textual character as opposed to real Manicheans let alone “real” heretics,
I shall only briefly mention some of his comments. In Ibn al-Nadīm’s descrip-
tion of the books ascribed to Mani, we see some of the familiar characters of
the New and Old Testaments, but they appear unrecognizable in the context
of Manichean texts. In one such account, Ibn al-Nadīm informs us:

They sent Jesus, and with him a deity who sought out the two archons [male
and female], imprisoned them, and delivered the two who had been born.
Jesus proceeded to speak to the man who had been born, that is Adam,
enlightening him about the Gardens [of Paradise], the deities, Hell, the
devils, the earth and heavens, and the sun and moon. He caused him to fear
 The Amorphous Zindīq 173

Eve, explaining to him that she was forbidden, restraining him from going
to her and making him afraid to approach her, so that he would obey.31

In this account, all of which takes place against the backdrop of an eternal
universe, biblical characters are intermixed, but in such a manner that the nar-
rative expansion given to them would have made little or no sense to Muslim
cosmology. Chronologically it is unclear because, in Christian fashion, it
puts Jesus, qua Holy Spirit, at the beginning. Moreover, all of the negative
characters engage in forbidden sexual relations, whereas the protagonists re-
frain from engaging in such activity. In leading a life of strict celibacy and
asceticism, two of the hallmarks of Manichaean religious life, they do the op-
posite of what good Muslims are supposed to do. Again, it is their ostensible
Muslimness—if not for Ibn al-Nadīm, then at least the person entrusted by
the caliph to be the ā ib al-zanādiqa—that is the problem. Occupying elite
professions (secretaries, courtiers, poets, theologians), they appear to ob-
serve the normal rules of propriety, but it is precisely their elite status—and it
seems to me that this is why they had to be made into elites—that meant they
could flaunt such behavior at leisure on account of their social prestige. This
is why they are imagined, as we have seen, to have mocked Islamic behavior
and parodied the Qur ān in private.32
How does this differ from Jews and Christians? Unlike Jews and
Christians who, for the most part, remained in their ancestral religions,
zindīqs transgressed a boundary when they converted to Islam. Wherever
there is boundary crossing, there is necessarily anxiety. They thus resemble
those hated figures from Judaism, like Abdallāh ibn Saba , encountered in
chapter 5, who was also imagined to sow dissent and discord through his per-
fidious conversion. It would seem, and Ibn al-Nadīm’s detailed descriptions
confirm this, that Muslims knew that Manicheans had books. Yet, as the
story recounted earlier concerning al-Ma mūn informs us, they did not have
the proper books (“books of God”) in the sense that they were not mentioned
in the Qur ān—unlike the books of the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians.
If there is no qur ānic precedent for the Manichaeans—and this was one of
my main points in the first part of this study—then there could be no map for
Muslims to think about them. If Muhammad had not interacted with them,
there was neither a script nor a set of roles for them to play.
Zindīqs—and, again, I note the fluidity of the term—were perceived to be
such a threat precisely because they symbolized, at least to those Muslims
tasked with the codification of Islam (and, by extension, heresy), those who
174 Subsequent Constructions

had left their ancestral religions and who had either refused to join any
other or adopted another in bad faith.33 Manichaeans and Marcionites,
among others, were no longer recognizable as Christians and were for
the most part completely repudiated by Christian orthodoxy as such.34
Muslims thus classified them as “dualists,” making such communities inel-
igible for the status of ahl al-kitāb. If any of them converted to Islam, their
conversions were perceived to have been insincere and, even worse, an ex-
cuse to boundary-cross to undermine the faith of simple believers. It seems
that from here, the category “zindīq” could be expanded or contracted at
will to include any or all that threatened the nature of what was becoming
“true” and “authentic” Muslim teaching. Zindīqs thus served a double
role: They revealed the wages of improper belief, just as they aided in the
articulation of true belief. Unlike Jews and Christians who were necessary
and constituent parts of Islam’s genealogy, zindīqs were largely inexplicable
to Muslims in terms of either their doctrines or beliefs. As a result, they
represented Islam’s antithesis.
If anything, zindīqs appear as the opposite of Muslims and, by extension,
ahl al-kitāb. For example, and once again using the phrasing of Ibn al-Nadīm,
but now put into the mouth of Mani:

He who would enter the religion [of Manicheanism; literally al-dīn] must
examine his soul. If he finds that he can subdue lust and covetousness, re-
frain from eating meat, drinking wine, as well as from marriage, and if he
can also avoid causing injury to water, fire, trees, and living beings, then
let him enter. But if he is unable to do all of these things, he shall not enter
the religion. If however he loves the religion, but is unable to subdue his
lust and craving, let him seize upon guarding the religion and its Elect [al-
iddīqūn] that there may be an offsetting of his unworthy actions, and times
in which he devotes himself to work and righteousness, nighttime prayer,
intercession, and pious humility.35

On the level of belief and doctrine, Manichaeans/zindīqs were simul-

taneously imagined to go against and, in so doing, helped to define better
the tenets of Islam that were currently under construction. They did not eat
meat, for example, and were not supposed to marry, or have sexual relations.
In addition, the iddīqūn, those select members who had knowledge of and
performed all the rights of the religion and who were dependent upon lay
members for their support, would have been anathema—not unlike the
 The Amorphous Zindīq 175

spiritual elites represented by the Imāms—to what was slowly coalescing as

Sunnī orthodoxy.
Manicheans, al-Nadim implies, go both too far and not far enough in their
worship. They pray, according to him, five or seven times a day—the latter
number being more than Muslims—but in their prostrations they pray not
just to the God of the heavens but also to others not worthy of such prayer. In
the third and fourth prostrations, for example, we read that the worshipper
is to say:

I bow down and render praise with a pure heart and truthful tongue to the
great deity, father of the lights and their substance; praised and blessed art
thou, and thy greatness in its entirety, as well as to those blessed ones who
know thee and whom thou has called upon. . . . Then he will say during the
fourth [prostration]: “I render praise and bow down to all of the deities and
to all of the light-shining angels and to all of the lights and all of the hosts
that have sprung from the great deity.”36

Here, Manicheans are described as worshipping not just God, but all those
beings that are said to emerge from him. Such a pantheistic tendency was to
Muslim theologians (mutakallimūn) certainly in contrast to the main prin-
ciple of monotheism (taw īd), which imagined only God as worthy of sup-
plication. From the perspective of Islam, Manicheans were also a problem on
account of the character flaws of their prophet, Mani, whom, according to
Ibn al-Nadīm:

Some people say that he had two deformed feet and others that it was only
his right foot. In his books Mani belittled the other prophets, finding fault
with them and accusing them of falsehood, asserting that the devils had
gained mastery over them and spoken by means of their tongues, in some
places in his books he said that they were devils and he stated that Jesus,
who is famous among us and the Christians, was Satan.37

At a time when the young community was articulating the biography of its
prophet and his perfection, the character of Mani, once again, stood in direct
opposition. Mani, in other words, neither looked (on account of his corporeal
blemishes) nor acted (on account of his belittling other prophets) prophet-
like. Since he is not mentioned in the Qur ān, moreover, he is—unlike the
prophets of Judaism and Christianity—not a prophet and is not recognized
176 Subsequent Constructions

by Islam as such. From this dearth of mentions, he can be constructed as a

false prophet with the understanding that those who are Manicheans prac-
tice a heretical religion.
Ibn al-Nadīm’s description of the contents and practices of Manicheans—
including their books and sectarian divisions—leads into a discussion of
zandaqa. He informs his reader that in the days of Mu izz al-Dawlah (r.
334–356/945–967), the first of the Buyid emirs of Iraq, he was personally
acquainted with over three hundred Manichaeans in Baghdad; at the time
of writing there were not more than five.38 His discussion of those charged
with zandaqa, however, is relatively short in comparison, listing only a few
names of theologians—whose books, he informs us, were destroyed.39 His
main concern in this short section is to show how issues of “dualism” made
their way into the heart of Islamic theology. The brevity of the section, how-
ever, would seem to mean that the “threat” of the zindīqs had largely passed
by his time.

Zindīqs and the Falsification of Prophetic Traditions

On account of the imprecision and fluidity inherent to the category, zindīqs

could be—and frequently were—imagined to be both everywhere and no-
where, often at the same time. This was perhaps necessary on account of the
fact that as orthodoxy began to take shape and as it came into clearer episte-
mological focus, religious others continued to play their part as the catalyst
for self-definition. Historically, this coincided with the need to supplement
the qur ānic narrative with other sources to develop what would become the
Islamic legal tradition and, by extension, Islam. It is important to be clear that
at this point—just prior to the creation of the mi na to deal with zindīqs—all
of this was still very much in flux. adīth reports were being collected, but
not yet in their authoritative collections, and Muhammad’s Sunna was slowly
emerging and being articulated therefrom.40 To ascertain the latter—namely,
the body of literature used to prescribe the traditional customs and practices
of the community, both social and legal—one needed the former, namely,
the verbally transmitted record of the teachings, deeds, and sayings of the
Prophet and his companions.
While all of this would be taken for granted over the course of the ensuing
centuries, it is important to note that at this time, the time of the early Abbāsid
caliphate, none of this was clear. As adīth reports were being collected, for
 The Amorphous Zindīq 177

example, there was a growing fear on the part of what is sometimes referred
to as “traditionalists”—but again which I prefer to call, following the lead of
Hodgson, “ adīth folk”—that their work of constructing a particular vision
of Islam was being corrupted or, at the very least, under threat.41 We now
begin to see the charge that zindīqs were actively attempting to corrupt Islam
from within by the falsification of prophetic traditions.42 What better way to
characterize one’s enemies than to personify them as “heretics,” those who, in
polar opposition to the adīth folk, were imagined to work against the health
of the umma?
Within this context, some of the most famous zindīqs—like Ibn al-
Muqaffa (executed in 139/756 or 142/759),43 Abd al- Karīm b. Abī al- Awgha
(executed sometime between 152/769 and 155/772), and Salih b. Abd al-
Quddūs (executed in 167/783)—were accused of falsifying adīth reports.
We begin to see the correlation between “inauthentic” adīths and heresy.
Abd al- Karīm b. Abī al- Awgha, for example, was said to have forged over
four thousand adīth reports before his execution.44 Chokr argues that such
charges were the direct result of the widespread ideological antagonism be-
tween the adīth folk on the one hand, and rationalist theologians who were
beginning to coalesce as the Mu atazila on the other.45 Such debates revolved
around the nature of reason, metaphorical language and the Qur ān, whether
or not the Qur ān was created, the nature of divine attributes, and free will
versus determinism. Charging one’s opponents of heresy became a conven-
ient way both to discredit their ideas and, as we have already witnessed time
and again, to further sharpen one’s own. Theologians could now be accused
of being zindīqs, who had taken foreign ideas learned from, for example, the
pagan Greeks or Persians, and who subsequently tried to apply them to both
an articulation and an understanding of Islam.
The accusation of being a zindīq further allowed the adīth folk to excise
anything they disagreed with or that contradicted their vision of Islam. If
a adīth report did not coincide with emerging orthodoxy, for example, it
could be neatly written off as the forgery of a zindīq. Anything that adīth
folk disagreed with, in other words, could simply be labeled as the product
of a zindīq. Even the idea that the Qur ān was created—which would form
the topic of a subsequent mi na, under al-Ma mūn—was later said to be the
result of zindīq influence. Most significantly, though, the zindīq enabled the
adīth folk to define themselves and their beliefs as normative and as or-
thodox by staking out a position for themselves in a manner that was imag-
ined as the polar opposite of heresy.
178 Subsequent Constructions

Not only were zindīqs such as the aforementioned accused of forging

adīths, but another charge leveled against them was their imitation of the
Qur ān.46 In this, they were imagined to have been the spiritual descendants
of the Meccan kāfirūn mentioned in the Qur ān, who were informed that
they would never be able to produce a text as perfect as that of Muslim holy
scripture. Showing the deep-rooted and structural connections between
qur ānic unbelief and contemporaneous heresy, the zindīqs were imagined
as actively taking up the challenge. Engagement in such activity, whether
real or imagined is not the point, further contributed to the suspicion that
zindīqs denied the divine nature and nobility of the Qur ān, while simul-
taneously undermining the perfection of its messenger, Muhammad. In
particular, zindīqs were accused of engaging in mu āra a al-Qur ān, lit-
erally “parody of the Qur ān,” a charge that further invoked the qur ānic
trope of deceit and trickery of the munāfiqūn.47 Once again, we see the flu-
idity between earlier qur ānic terms on the one hand and contemporary
nonbelievers on the other. Zindīqs thus stand charged of actively subverting
what was in the process of becoming the two major sources of Islamic law,
namely, the Qur ān and the adīth. Whether or not they actually wrote what
they considered to be better versions of the Qur ān or whether or not they
sought to parody it is not at issue for me here; rather, what is at stake is that
they needed to be imagined to do this because such actions further contrib-
uted to their “heretical” status and continued to justify how the zindīq, with
all of his contradictory character traits, was the polar opposite of the be-
liever and, just as importantly, someone who went out of his way to subvert
the religion of Islam.48
Within this context, one of the most famous zindīqs was Ibn al-Muqaffa
(d. 139/757 or 142/759). A Persian, he served as a secretary under the
Umayyad governors. He was by all accounts a belletrist, a translator between
Persian and Arabic (most notably of Kalīla wa-dimna), and a denizen of the
courtly culture of the Umayyad and subsequent Abbāsid empires.49 When
the Abbāsids overthrew the former dynasty, he—unlike many others—was
able to maintain his courtly position, serving in Basra as a secretary under
the uncles of the second Abbāsid caliph al-Man ūr (r. 136/754–178/775). He
thus personifies the transition between the two caliphal dynasties, and wher-
ever such a transition exists, we not surprisingly encounter a source of po-
tential anxiety. Because of this, though himself a Muslim, the enemies of Ibn
al-Muqaffa accused him of writing a defense of Manicheanism, in addition
to writing a parody of the qur ānic text.50
 The Amorphous Zindīq 179

We have already seen how a number of court secretaries were accused of

being zindīqs. The great majority of those tried and executed during the reign
of al-Mahdī, according to Vajda, existed within this class, which seems to
have functioned as the epicenter of late Umayyad Basran literary culture.51
Ibn al-Muqaffa was firmly entrenched in this culture and seems, according
to Arjomand, to have won over important members of the Arab aristoc-
racy.52 Again, whether or not there existed a culture of zandaqa in Basra is
less my concern here so much as it is that a Persian intellectual class of sec-
retaries and courtiers were responsible for generating a number of political
accusations on the part of their Arab rivals. Again, we see a complementary
set of tensions—this time, for lack of a better word, “ethnic” or “nation-
alist”—folded into the complex and inclusive criteria of “the zindīqs.”53 It
is Ibn al-Muqaffa , one of the main figures associated with the zindīqs, who
is charged with a host of offenses: He is a Persian, a poet, a holdover from
the Umayyad dynasty, one who undermines the Qur ān, and someone who
is believed to secretly harbor Manichaean beliefs and practices. He is thus
the zindīq personified. Ibn al-Muqaffa —not unlike Paul for Christianity or
Abdallāh ibn Saba for Judaism—thus becomes for the subsequent Muslim
tradition the personification of the zindīq. This seems to have been one of
the main reasons he was believed to be the leading figure in a group of four
intellectuals who reportedly conceived of the project to parody the Qur ān,
and the only name agreed upon in all of the sources.54 The continued charge
of zandaqa and a change in political climate that meant the withdrawal of his
political protection led to the execution of Ibn al-Muqaffa in 139/756 or 142/
759.55

Caliphal Authority, Deviancy, and the Shaping

of Orthodoxy

Abū Abdallāh Muhammad, better known by his regnal name al-Mahdī (r.
159/775–169/785), was the third caliph of the Abbāsid caliphate. Without
a routinized system of succession, according to John P. Turner, “each Caliph
needed to demonstrate from the outset of his reign and at regular intervals
that he was indeed the Commander of the Faithful.”56 Every caliph, in other
words, was upon his succession immediately faced with a crisis of legitima-
tion with which he had to deal. Since the Abbāsids had come to power on
a tide of messianic hopes, much of which drew upon popular support of
180 Subsequent Constructions

Alīd loyalists, it is perhaps fitting that al-Mahdī took the title he did since
according to Alīd tradition the Mahdī was the rightly “guided one,” an es-
chatological redeemer who would usher in the day of judgment (yawm al-
qiyamah) and rid the world of evil and corruption.57 The Mahdī, in other
words, is synonymous with a just and protective rule over the umma. Since
the “parting of the ways” between Sunnism and Shī ism had yet to occur, al-
Mahdī certainly drew upon such sentiment to help legitimate his rule.
That Abū Abdallāh Muhammad chose the name that he did signals to
just what an extent he imagined himself as reaffirming the divine origin
of his office and as functioning as the guarantor of true guidance to the
Muslim community.58 Al-Mahdī, more than his predecessors, stressed his
role as champion of Islam. For example, he ordered the al-Aq ā mosque in
Jerusalem to be remodeled, in addition to overseeing an extension to the
mosque in Mecca.59 Such displays were undoubtedly meant to show how
he needed to legitimize his acquisition and subsequent exercise of political
and religious authority, given the fact that the two were not entirely separate
from one another in the manner that they increasingly would become among
his successors. In the first year of his reign (160/776), for example, al- abarī
relates the following letter that al-Mahdī wrote to his governor in Basra:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the most just thing
that the governors of the Muslims, their couriers, and the general public
is that they must undertake their affairs and their judgement in accord-
ance with the Book of God. They should synchronize their desires with it.
They should persevere with it and take pleasure in it, in both their likes and
dislikes because [this book] establishes the legal punishments of God, the
knowledge of His Law, the following of His wishes, and the obtaining of His
rewards, and His good recompense. Whatever goes in conflict with it, in
rejecting it and in surrendering to desires other than it, leads to all sorts of
going astray, and depravity in this world and the next.60

Since the caliphate, with the caliph at its head, ostensibly embodied the
unity of the community, at least in this very early period, the caliph was nec-
essarily charged with providing limits to the boundaries of orthodoxy by
defining the correct position on any number of doctrinal and legal issues.
This is why, once again, the early Abbāsid caliphs sought to intervene in reli-
gious matters—which were, by definition, also political—through the estab-
lishment of what counted as normative Muslim belief and practice. Perhaps
 The Amorphous Zindīq 181

nowhere is this clearer than in the respective mi nas of al-Mahdī and al-
Ma mūn. This caliphal policy to set proper belief, according to Lapidus,
was not uncommon in the late antique environment, with Byzantine and
Sasanian emperors doing the same. According to him:

The Byzantine imperial view was that the emperor influenced the formula-
tion of religious doctrines so that they were in accord with political interests
of the state. Byzantine emperors took the utmost interest in the regula-
tion of church doctrine. They called and presided over church councils
and suggested formulas for the creed. . . . The emperors also appointed the
leading patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops.61

Ascertaining correct religious doctrine necessarily meant defining devi-

ancy therefrom. Only by engaging in the latter activity, and its subsequent
back-projection, could a path be ascertained, a path from which others were
shown to have strayed. Within this larger context, caliphs and those who
worked in their service sought to define themselves and their positions as
normative and as existing at the time of Muhammad, all the while juxta-
posing that normativity with religious deviants, whom as we have seen time
and again could also be back-projected onto the earliest period. If we con-
tinue with the aforementioned passage from al- abarī, we witness just how
al-Mahdī seeks to differentiate his own rule from that of his predecessors.
Of particular concern was his desire to distance himself from Mu āwiya, the
founder of the Umayyad caliphate, whom, we are told, did not rule according
to “piety, good guidance, by observing the Sunna, or the example of the past
imāms of truth. Rather [he ruled] on account of his desire for the destruc-
tion of his faith and his afterlife, and his determination to contradict both the
Sunna and the Book.”62 Juxtaposed against Mu āwiya, al-Mahdī informs us
that he

is following the words of the Prophet of God and what truthful people and
the rightly guided Imāms have agreed upon. He does not hold permissible
what Mu āwiya has ventured that contradicts the Book of God and the
Sunna of His prophet. The Commander of the Faithful is the person most
entitled to do that and to apply it because of his kinship with the Prophet
of God and his following in his tracks, his keeping alive his Sunna, and his
rejection of the Sunnas [sunan] of others that deviate and outrage truth and
good guidance.63
182 Subsequent Constructions

With such claims, according to Turner, al-Mahdī “was making a legitimating

claim for his social role as Commander of the Faithful. He clearly asserted his
right to determine the correct response to a legal problem and his ability to
make authoritative pronouncements about the meaning of the Qur’an and
which Sunna to apply.”64 In stressing his kinship to the Prophet, al-Mahdī
was in effect proclaiming that he was Muhammad’s true heir, that he per-
sonified the true practice (Sunna) of the Prophet, and that he alone was in a
unique position to define what Islam was and what it was not.
Al-Mahdī presents us with one of the earliest attempts at dogmatic en-
forcement of doctrine and practice with his establishment of a mi na, “in-
quisition,” to enforce correct belief. The problem, of course, is that some want
to see a sharp distinction between the “religious” and the “political” in late
eighth- and early ninth-century Islam.65 Turner, however, says it best when
he claims that the mi na “is usually discussed as an entirely religious phe-
nomenon, reinforcing the false dichotomy that religion was divorced from
politics. In the Islamic empires, all religious acts and positions were inher-
ently political, and any political act was couched in and perceived through
religious terms. As such, the mi na addressed questions of religious au-
thority, of legal interpretation, and of political control.”66
The zindīqs figured highly in this process and, for some reason or set of
reasons, they were isolated as the main antagonists to what was coalescing
into normative practice and belief. They may well have been singled out on
account of their inchoateness, which made them omnipresent, even if their
actual existence was difficult to ascertain. Indeed, the very fluidity of the
term—including everyone from dualists, to materialists, to libertines, es-
sentially anyone who went against the mores of the community—seems to
have led to an active and repressive campaign to weed them out of the umma.
Both everywhere and nowhere in equal measure, they threatened by their
very amorphousness since anyone, in theory, could be one. This campaign
was conducted, according to Chokr, under the guise of returning to Islamic
purity.67 In this respect, the practice of signaling out heretics helped, among
other things, to publicize membership in a unified moral community, to in-
voke Melchert’s conception of the piety of the adīth folk mentioned earlier.
The campaign against the zindīqs officially began in 160/776, when, ac-
cording to al- abarī, al-Mahdī had a dream in which al- Abbās appeared to
him and told him to kill anyone who worshipped two gods.68 Despite the
dream, however, the initial repression of zindīqs did not occur until 163/779
when al-Mahdī commenced his campaign against the Byzantines, and while
 The Amorphous Zindīq 183

in Aleppo he ordered his mu tasib, Abd al-Jabbār, to arrest zindīqs in the

region. The arrested were subsequently brought before the caliph, who or-
dered the execution of some of them, and the proclamation was then issued
that their heretical books were to be, both symbolically and literally, lacer-
ated with knives.69
This seems to have been the only systematic Muslim persecution of
Manichaeans—if, indeed, it was the threat of Manichaeans that led to the
mi na—that we know about in the early Islamic period. Our sources do not
give a clear indication of the reason for the persecution, but, as de Blois notes,
it may surely be no coincidence that it occurred shortly after the conversion
of the Uyghur rulers to Manichaeism in 762.70 This meant that Manichaeism
now suddenly became the state religion of an important neighboring
kingdom to the Abbāsid Empire and was evidently perceived as a threat to
the security of the caliphate.71
Zindīqs were now arrested and either given the chance to recant or, if un-
willing to or on account of political expediency, executed.72 By 167/783, the
inquisition changed focus from weeding out “obvious” zindīqs to focusing
on Muslims who were now suspected of being zindīqs, which of course func-
tioned as a type of code for all those not holding beliefs deemed “orthodox”
or “normative.” Even after al-Mahdī’s death, the mi na was continued by his
sons, al-Hādī (r. 169/785–170/786) and perhaps even Hārūn al-Rashīd (r.
170/786–194/809).73
Before I finish this section, it is worth pointing out that al-Mahdī’s mi na
served as an important precursor to the more famous one by his subsequent
successor, al-Ma mūn.74 In the latter’s, also at stake was the perceived need to
establish God’s absolute unity (taw īd) by denying to Him that which might
be regarded as coeternal. The particular source of confusion seems to have
been over the exact nature of the Qur ān, namely, whether it was eternal or
created. If eternal, this would imply that there existed two eternal concepts,
both God and the Qur ān.75 Under the influence of Mu tazila theologians, al-
Ma mūn forced judges, witnesses, and adīth transmitters to swear an oath
that they believed the Qur ān was eternal.76
Both al-Mahdī and al-Ma mūn, in other words, imagined the institution of
the caliphate as divinely given and they took it as their responsibility to be the
supreme custodians and guardians of Muhammad’s religion and its and laws
on Earth. The caliph’s duty, and this notion would cease quite quickly in the
decades after al-Ma mūn’s death, was to combat unbelievers, excise heretics,
and clearly define Islam from its predecessors of Judaism and Christianity,
184 Subsequent Constructions

thereby protecting the unity of the state and maintaining public order and
security. The caliph, in sum, was accountable to God, and God alone, for his
actions, and was thus regarded by his subjects as the executor of the emerging
prophetic Sunna and divine sharī a.77 As with his predecessor, al-Mahdī, al-
Ma mūn’s mi na fits the patterns of defining the borders of orthodoxy by
articulating proper belief against those imagined to be opposed to it.

The Zindīq and the Shaping of Orthodoxy

If the Shī a functioned as the internal other, zindīqs became the wholly other.
Since no teachings could be ascribed to them, they could be conveniently
imagined to be everything that Islam was not. Zindīqs could be made into
dualists, they could be become atheists, they could be lustful or lascivious, or
they could simply be someone with whom one disagreed, whether politically
or theologically. It was, on account of its inclusivity, a fairly popular charge
to be leveled. The period prior to al-Mahdī had seen a great deal of frag-
mentation—including Arab clients who were believed to be only minimally
Muslim, in addition to ascertaining the status of non-Muslims in Islamic
lands and reckoning the increasing spiritual force of pro- Alīd claims—and
seems to have coincided with a desire to “return” to a pristine and authentic
Islam imagined to have existed at the time of the Prophet. It is within this
context that we begin to witness the defining characteristics of a zindīq.78
Al-Mahdī certainly inherited a diverse empire full of political instability
and that included many diverse religions. This inheritance, more than any-
thing, led to the rise of Islamic theology (kalām) and the need to refute other
religions. Those tasked with the framing of Islam came to define zandaqa as
the negation of any of the basic principles (e.g., taw īd, the creation of the
world, prophecy) of what they imagined to be Muhammad’s Islam. Anyone
who did not fit the criteria of what a “good” or “authentic” Muslim was could
thus potentially be accused of zandaqa. The term, as we have seen, played a
crucial role in defining (Sunnī) orthodoxy.
At least Jews and Christians were connected—no matter how loosely or
incorrectly in the minds of Islam’s framers—to certain essentialized ideas
that were deemed to define them. They represented religions that had gone
astray. The Qur ān was able to explain to Muslims why that had happened
by pointing to the sources of their errors. Jews and Christians, Judaism and
Christianity, were originally pristine religions—like Islam, if not actually
 The Amorphous Zindīq 185

Islam—that had been corrupted and tampered with. They stood as witnesses
to what could happen if believers were not careful.
Although not explicitly mentioned in the Qur ān, the Shī a could like-
wise be plotted within the same narrative of originary message and subse-
quent fall from grace. They were the group, in other words, that was unable
to recognize the Islam that the ahl al-sunna was creating in their own image
and back-projecting onto the earliest period. The Shī a, then, were those
Muslims—necessary, but unfortunate—who went astray, threatened the
umma from within, and functioned as a warning of sectarianism.
As a non-qur ānic term and category, however, the zindīqs posed eighth-
and ninth-century Muslim thinkers with considerable problems. They had
no script and therefore no explicable past. If others represented non-Muslims
or the wrong kinds of Muslims, zindīqs represented “anti-Muslims.” So many
of the theological features that the zindīqs were imagined to deny—exist-
ence of God, creation, determinism, revelation, the nature of prophecy—
became the polar opposite of what Muslim theologians constructed. In this
respect they function like Jews, Christians, and Shī a, among others. All of
these groups represent the opposite of what was imagined as normative—al-
beit in their different ways—and thus functioned as convenient foils in the
ongoing quest to define orthodoxy. However, it was the zindīqs, more than
any of these other groups, that threatened to unravel the community—some-
thing made all the more dangerous on account of their inchoateness. Lurking
in the shadows, they were thought to emerge from the penumbral darkness
only to forge, to parody, and to subvert. They thus played a major role in the
process of boundary maintenance.
 Conclusions

In 1833 Ernest Renan famously quipped that Islam, unlike other religions,
emerged “in the full light of history.” If we were to take the sources mentioned
in the previous chapters at face value, as transcripts of what really happened,
it might well be possible to agree with such a statement. However, as I have
argued throughout, these sources provide anything but historically accurate
accounts. Instead, they reveal a host of subterranean issues to which we must
be attentive. They are, then, hardly illumined by history’s “full light.” On the
contrary, the origins of Islam are as unclear as those of any other religion,
and the majority of our texts represent a series of back-projections—often
composed in politically and socially unstable contexts—meant to show what
might have happened or what ought to have happened as opposed to what
actually did happen. The past, in other words, was the one place where order
and tidiness could be established, even if it always tended to be done from the
vantage point of the present.
Within this larger context of what early Muslim texts say and mean, pre-
vious chapters have explored the manifold ways that others—whether those
associated with other religions, those imagined as belonging to internal sec-
tarian divisions, or those imagined as completely beyond the pale—were
used to construct “orthodoxy.” All of these religious others permitted those
in charge of shaping Sunnī orthodoxy—perhaps best instantiated in the
mi na inaugurated by the caliph al-Mahdī in chapter 7—with drawing the
boundaries of Islam by ascertaining what was or should be inside and what
should be excised or remain without.
This is certainly not to say that all Muslim thinkers in this time period were
engaged in polemics, but it is to make the case that a great many needed these
others to think simultaneously about what Islam was and what it was not. This
could be as easy as making the case that “whereas religious others do ‘x’ so we
do ‘y.’ ” Or, it could be more technical as intricate theological or legal issues
were developed in response to certain perceived Judaizing, Christianizing,
Shī ī-izing, Zandīq-izing, or other “foreign” tendencies. Regardless, such ac-
tivities were always done within the larger context of “returning” to a pristine

An Anxious Inheritance. Aaron W. Hughes, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197613474.003.0009
 Conclusions 187

Islam, that of the time of Muhammad, one wherein no division was thought
to exist and discrete Muslim actors lived in a manner that was clearly differ-
entiated from other equally discrete religions.
The anxiety afforded by religious competition is why so many of the lit-
erary genres that emerge out of the early periods seem to be so conscious of
religious difference and alterity. Islam, to return to a point I made in the in-
troduction, is always thought about comparatively. It is, as we have seen time
and again, actively constructed by being put in counterpoint with others.
I have tried to make the case that this was on account of the fact that the
seminal work of Islam, the Qur ān, was born into a late antique environment
that was highly cognizant of religious differences. Islam’s framers—Qur ān
redactors, adīth collectors, legists, poets, theologians, and heresiologists,
among others—were thus fully attuned to such alterity and expended great
energy to differentiate the new from the old. They did this by, among other
things, creating a grand narrative that was biblical in proportion, charting
other religions’ rise, florescence, sin, and ultimate fall from divine favor. This
helped to fit Islam into the new narratives that it gave these other religions,
both showing how Islam represented their perfection and functioning as a
warning to Muslims that the same fate not befall them.
My concern has been to show how orthodoxy is extracted out of a com-
plex set of comparative procedures, and not infrequently in times of political
and social turmoil. Religions—and Islam is certainly no different—do not,
Athena-like, emerge completely formed from the heads of divine beings. Nor
do their origins appear, to invoke Renan’s formulation, “in the full light of
history.” Rather, religions emerge slowly and through working out a complex
set of doctrinal, liturgical, and related issues that not infrequently revolve
around highly political binaries of orthodox/heterodox and us/not-us.
It should be clear by now that when Muslim thinkers invoked or discussed
other religions, they were ultimately holding up a mirror in front of them-
selves. The articulation of oneself, and one’s tradition, demands the articu-
lation of the other and the other’s tradition. More often than not, the end
product of such musings involved the manufacture of an Islam, often in
their own image, followed by its back-projection onto the earliest period.
An essentialized Islam could now be put in counterpoint with equally essen-
tialized religious others, and in such a manner that they could be neatly
choreographed from the vantage point of the present.
Orthodoxy, both in sum and in substance, is a political process and not a
natural one. It is perhaps for this reason that it was primarily at those points
188 Conclusions

at which Islam and religious others intersected with one another—at least
in the idealized textual worlds of our sources—that we are able to witness a
real anxiety when it comes to thinking about and through alterity. No one
can doubt, for example, that Islam is related to other monotheisms, yet it
was clear to its early framers—as it is to modern scholars—that the new re-
ligion could not be reducible to them. This means that Jews, for example,
had to be assigned a set of essentialized character traits, emerging from the
qur ānic narrative and subsequently expanded upon, that make them per-
fidious or appear as tricksters. In like manner, Christians, again based on
the Qur ān’s initial description of them, are often reduced to their inability
to understand their own Christology properly, something that was further
assumed to be based on Jewish perfidy. Time and again, we witnessed these
other religions—often stripped down, essentialized, and personified as a set
of stock literary characters—interact with Muhammad and the early Muslim
community, and in such a manner that they permit their authors to bring
Muslim dogma and practice into clearer focus.
Despite such negative characteristics, it was clear to the early framers of
Islam that their own religion everywhere referred to these other religions.
Since there was no way to escape such references, and given the fact that for
the first century Islam was a minority religion surrounded by non-Muslim
religions, religious others played a central role in the construction of Islamic
identity. Islam, situated within the larger constellation of religions, needed
a genealogy; yet, at the same time, if Islam appeared as too similar to its
precursors, it risked the accusation that it was little more than a pale imita-
tion of them and thereby meeting the same fate that they did. The result is
that these points of contact had to be carefully mined and choreographed so
that Islam represented either their corrective or their natural fulfillment.
Many of Islam’s positive characteristics thus became the mirror inverse of
others’ negative traits. If Jews did “x,” for example, Muslims were to do the
opposite; or, if Christians believed “y,” then Muslims had to believe its oppo-
site. The framers of Islam, in other words, defined their tradition in a way that
absorbed or fulfilled others’ positive traits, while simultaneously offering a
repudiation of their more negative or unsavory ones. It was a fine line to walk,
to be sure, and this is why points of contact produced the sorts of anxiety
with otherness that we witness so often in our sources. For this reason, ide-
alized textualized versions mitigate the anxiety because the interactions, and
the ends thereof, could be safely and neatly controlled. Islamic orthodoxy
thereby defined religious others using variations on the themes of innovation
 Conclusions 189

(bid a), deviation (in irāf), and accretion (ziyāda), and in so doing neces-
sarily defined their own religion as pure, authentic, and unchanged since the
time of Muhammad, if not even prior to him.
Even if the Sunnī tradition would go on, with various permutations, to be-
come the majoritarian position in Islam, it is important not to regard other
Islamic traditions as somehow heterodox, let alone heretical. On the con-
trary, we need to investigate and study the various processes whereby the
Sunnī tradition came to regard itself as orthodox and the concomitant way
it relegated others to the level of heterodoxies in the case of other interpret-
ations of Islam or as in theological error on account of scriptural tampering
in the case of other religions. Such a process involved examining texts as
constructing worlds that did not—or could not—exist in reality. These texts,
in other words, present idealized maps based on what was imagined to have
happened in qur ānic times. This, in turn, allowed us to see how orthodoxy
emerged not at the expense of other traditions, but in large part in conversa-
tion with them. One cannot construct “orthodoxy,” in other words, without
simultaneously constructing “heterodoxy”—the two categories, as we have
seen time and again, are but two sides of the same coin.
I thus framed this study around anxiety, a feeling of worry, nervousness, or
unease, typically about one’s relationship and interactions with others. Such
anxiety can take the form of ignoring others, of avoiding them, but, in the
realm of religion, more often than not this involves confronting the other
head on to show the errors of their ways. In the cases examined here, how-
ever, it would seem to take the form of an apprehension toward others based
on the notion that, at base, one is ultimately too much like them, and energy
needs to be expended to mine and subsequently articulate difference. This
leads to the need to differentiate—through caricature, through stereotype,
through essentialization, and even through violence, if necessary—self from
other with the aim of creating fixed and certain boundaries even at a time
when there could have been none.
Yet, to move forward, it is necessary to see such textual encounters for
what they are. They are not historical accounts. Rather, they construct
narratives that create a set of literary characters, based on essentialized char-
acteristics, with an eye toward establishing one’s own tradition as norma-
tive. Others are wrong; they sin; they have gone astray; they have tampered
with their scriptures and traditions. All the while, however, those making
the charge imagine themselves to be that which the others were before their
malfeasance, thereby further legitimating their orthodoxy. This quest for
190 Conclusions

normativity, as should be clear, is not a natural project, but an eminently po-

litical and ideological one. And this is why it is incumbent upon us to study
it accordingly.
Islam’s subsequent ability to deal with religious others, be they internal
or external to the tradition, is ultimately contingent upon the application
of vague qur ānic references—a set of references that the Sunnī tradition
ultimately took over and used for their own ideological purposes. A past
constructed as pristine, in other words, presented a roadmap, back-projected
to be sure, upon which to place all those subsequently encountered. The cate-
gories of the past could be used and shaped by present concerns to locate the
strange, the incorrect, and, essentially, all that could be regarded as “foreign”
or as “not-us.”
When such a paradigm is subsequently transferred into the secular
study of Islam, religious others remain as problems that can be ignored at
best or refuted at worse. Religious others continue to produce a set of anx-
ieties, though admittedly of a different order than that witnessed in early
texts. In the final analysis, we need to move beyond the models and termi-
nology supplied by our sources. These sources, as we have seen throughout
this study, are often much later than the events upon which they purport to
describe, they have their own set of unique concerns, and they are not infre-
quently written from a highly polemical perspective. For obvious reasons,
their quest for certainty belies the ways in which, as I have tried to show here,
religious identity is fluid but then, in large part through the shadow of real or
imagined others, becomes entrenched.
 Abbreviations

AJS Review Association for Jewish Studies Review

AO Acta Orientalis
ASQ Arab Studies Quarterly
BO Bibliotheca Orientalis
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
DI Der Islam
EI Encyclopaedia of Islam, first edition (1913–1936)
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (1960–2005)
EQ Encyclopaedia of the Qur ān
GAL Geschichte der arabischen Literatur
HR History of Religions
HTR Harvard Theological Review
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies
IOS Israel Oriental Studies
IQ Islamic Quarterly
IS Iranian Studies
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JAL Journal of Arabic Literature
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JIH Journal of Interdisciplinary History
JIS Journal of Islamic Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
MW Muslim World
OLZ Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
192 Abbreviations

REI Revue des études islamiques

REJ Revue des études juives
RSO Rivista degli studi orientali
SCI Scripta Classica Israelica
SI Studia Islamica
SR Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses
ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
 Notes

Introduction

1. Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually Know About Muhammad?,” Open Democracy,

1–6. Online at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/mohammed_3866jsp/.
2. Stanley J. Tambiah, “Animals Are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit,” Ethnology 8.4
(1969): 423–459, at 457.
3. Perhaps most recently and forcefully put in Garth Fowden, Before and After
Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2014), 1–17.
4. For relevant context, see The Theodosian Code: Studies in the Imperial Law of Late
Antiquity, eds. Jill Harries and Ian Wood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993);
John F. Matthews, Laying Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and
Belief Under Theodosius II (408–450) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
5. I realize that recent years have witnessed a great deal of criticism of the category “re-
ligion,” and whether or not it is anachronous to apply it to other times and places
beyond the modern Euro-American West. Most recently, see Russell T. McCutcheon,
Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of
Nostalgia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Timothy Fitzgerald,
The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No
Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2016). While I sympathize with the sentiment, I remain convinced
that, as per The Theodosian Code, there nevertheless remains some sort of idea—met-
aphysical, ethical, cultural, whatever we want to call it—that people hold that makes
them perceive themselves as different from other social groups. Whether we want
to call this “religion,” especially as the term came to be defined in Protestant circles
wherefrom the modern academic study of religion emerged, or something else
is not my main concern in this study. For my intervention into such terminology,
see my Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 77–98.
6. See, for example, Judith McClure, “Handbooks Against Heresy in the West from the
Late Fourth to the Late Sixth Centuries,” Journal of Theological Studies 30 (1979): 186–
197; Averil Cameron, “How to Read Heresiology,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 33 (2003): 471–492; Richard Flower, “‘The Insanity of Heretics Must
Be Restrained’: Heresiology in the Theodosian Code,” in Theodosius II: Rethinking
194 Notes

the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity, ed. Christopher Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 172–194.
7. Ahmet Karamustafa, for example, has argued that the Qur ān is more concerned with
ummāt (sg. umma, to wit, “religious communities”) than it is with other descriptors,
such as shu ūb (“race/ethnicity”). See his “Community,” in Key Themes for the Study of
Islam, ed. Jamal J Elias (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), 93–103, at 95–97. See also Frederick
Matthewson Denny, “Community and Society in the Qur ān,” in Encyclopaedia of the
Qur ān, ed. Jane MacAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1: 367–386, at 372–373.
8. See the recent and important work of Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle
East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2018), 225–232; Christian C. Sahner, Christian Martyrs Under Islam: Religious
Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2018), 1–7.
9. For the complexities of this rapid spread, see Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s
Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For an account of some of the various
Christian responses to it, see Michael Phillip Penn, When Christians First Met
Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2015). More generally, see his Envisioning Islam: Syriac
Christians in the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015), 102–140. See also Sidney Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the
Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 23–44.
10. On the social, political, and historical settings of these types of individuals who
sought to understand their past, the historical record, and how they differed from
other genres of contemporaneous Arabic literature, see Chase F. Robinson, Islamic
Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–17.
11. A particularly good example of an interpretive grid that situates this process is David
S. Powers, Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last
Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 3–31.
12. See the comments in Philip Wood, “Introduction,” in History and Identity in the Late
Antique Near East, ed. P. Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xi–xxii, at
xi. See further H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 35–58.
13. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: The Consequences of Monotheism in Late
Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9–11.
14. To be discussed in chapters 4 and 5, respectively.
15. Most well known is Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the
Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For recent excellent
attempts to wade through the earliest Muslim and non-Muslim accounts, see Robert
G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian,
Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997);
Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and
the Beginning of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Most
 Notes 195

recently, see Sean W. Anthony, Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of
the Prophet of Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).
16. See the comments in Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan
Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–13.
17. On the problems of this term in early and medieval Islam, see Alexander Knysh,
“Orthodoxy and Heresy in Medieval Islam,” Muslim World 83.1 (1993): 48–67. And
more recently, see the study found in John P. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam: The
Competition for Political and Religious Authority in the Abbasid Empire (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2013), 23–32. More comparatively, see John B. Henderson, The Construction
of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian
Patterns (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
18. Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, 39–84.
19. See, for example, the comments, and attempt to bypass the difficulties, in Rudi
Paret, “Die Lücke in der Überlieferung über den Urislam,” in Westöstliche
Abhandlungen: Rudolf Tschudi zum siebzigsten Geburtstag überreicht von Freunden
und Schülern, ed. F. M. Meir (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1954), 147–153
20. As for the skeptical approach to these sources, I point to the usual works by John
Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Crone and Cook, Hagarism; and all
the more recent literature that follows in their wake.
21. For relevant overviews on how this impacts the Qur ān, see Harald Motzki,
“Alternative Accounts of the Qur ān’s Formation,” in The Cambridge Companion to
the Qur ān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 59–76. In the same volume, see also Andrew Rippin, “Western Scholarship and
the Qur ān,” 235–252.
22. In terms of the Qur ān, see Motzki, “Alternative Accounts of the Qur ān’s Formation,”
60–62. According to Motzki, if we accept the radical approach, then “there is no way
to establish anything of the revelation or the life of the historical Mu ammad from
the Qur ān, sīra, tafsīr or adīth. To look for historical facts in this sort of literature
would be a meaningless research exercise” (62). More recently, see Marijn van Putten,
“‘The Grace of God’ as Evidence for a Written Uthmanic Archetype: The Importance
of Shared Orthographic Idiosyncrasies,” BSOAS 82.2 (2019): 271–288.
23. The most radical example of this is Christoph Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading
of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of Koran (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus, 2007). For a critique of Luxenberg, see Walid Saleh, “The
Epistemological Fallacy and Qur ānic Studies,” in The Qur ān in Context: Historical
and Literary Investigations of Qur ānic Milieu, eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai
Sinai, and Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 649–698. Other examples of this in-
vestigation of qur ānic language include Guillaume Dye, “Traces of Bilingualism /
Multilingualism in Qur ānic Arabic,” in Arabic in Context: Celebrating 400 Years of
Arabic at Leiden University, ed. Ahmad al-Jallad (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 337–341; Dye,
“Réflexions méthodologiques sur la ‘rhétorique canonique,’ ” in Controverses sur les
écritures canoniques de l’islam, eds. Daniel de Smet and Muhammad Ali Amir-Moezzi
(Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2014), 147–156.
196 Notes

24. For a critique of the skeptical approach, see Fred Donner, Narratives of Islamic
Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press,
1998), 26, and more generally, 25–31. See, further, Aziz al-Azmeh, The Arabs and
Islam in Late Antiquity: A Critique of Approaches to Arabic Sources (Berlin: Gerlach
Press, 2014), 1–14.
25. Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 269–275.
26. Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple
Believers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 5–7.
27. See the comments in Sahner, Christian Martyrs Under Islam, 1–28.
28. Here my work differs from the likes of Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Islam and the Fate
of Others: The Salvation Question (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), esp. 2–16.

Chapter 1

1. Abū Bakr Muhammad b. Hārūn b. Yazīd al-Baghdādī al- anbalī al-Khallal, Ahl al-
milal wa al-ridda wa al-zanādiqa wa tārik al- alāt wa al-farā id min K. al-Jami, ed.
Ibrāhīm b. amad b. Sul ān (Riyad: Maktabat al-ma ārif li- l-nashr wa-al-tawzī ,
1996), 4.
2. A mad ibn anbal, Masā il, ed. Fa l al-Ra man Muhammad (Delhi: Dār al- ilmiyya,
1988), 3: 206 (no. 1658).
3. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 38–386. See also Antoine
Fattal, Le statut legal des non-musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Imprimerie
catholique, 1958), 180–203. For coins bearing crosses in addition to Arabic
inscriptions proclaiming Muhammad as “the prophet of God,” see Clive Foss,
Arab-Byzantine Coins: An Introduction, with a Catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks
Collection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 117–118; see also
Donald Whitcomb, “Notes for an Archaeology of Mu āwiya: Material Culture in
the Transition Period of Believers,” in Christians and Others in the Umayyad State,
eds. Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016), 11–27.
4. For relevant context, see Fergus Millar, Religion, Language and Community in the
Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 54–73; Millar, “Narrative and Identity in Mosaics from the Late Roman
Near East: Pagan, Jewish, and Christian,” in Empire, Church, and Society in the Late
Roman Near East: Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Saracens (Collected Studies 2004–2014)
(Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 147–176; Heather J. Sharkey, A History of Muslims, Christians,
and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–26.
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” in “To See Ourselves as
Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, and “Others” in Late Antiquity, eds. Jacob Neusner
and Ernest S. Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 3–49, at 47.
 Notes 197

6. Relevant studies on conversion in the early Islamic period include the fol-
lowing: Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in
Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Nehamia
Levtzion, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamicization,” in Conversion to Islam,
ed. N. Levtzion (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 1–23; Milka Levy-Rubin, “New
Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamicization in Palestine in the Early Muslim
Period: The Case of Samaria,” JESHO 43.3 (2000): 257–276.
7. Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to
Coexistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–57; see also Yohanan
Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–27.
8. See, for example, Tommaso Tesei, “Heraclius’ War Propaganda and the Qur ān’s
Promise of Reward for Dying in Battle,” SI 114 (2019): 219–247; and, more generally,
Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, 1–17.
9. A theme that would be picked up by the later Islamic literary tradition, such as
Muhammad Kha ābī’s (d. 386/996) Al-Bayan fī i jāz al-qur ān, ed A. Alīm (n.p.: al-
Qism al- Arabī al-jāmi a al-islāmiyya, 1953) and al-Bāqillānī’s (d. 403/1013) Kitab
i jāz al-qur ān, ed. Sayyid A mad aqr (Cairo: Dār al-Ma ārif bi-Mi r, n.d.). For rel-
evant context, see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the
Abbāsid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 282–320.
10. According to Peter Webb, Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 9:
Early Muslims were the first to imagine themselves as Arabs and initiated a
process of ethnogenesis which allowed them to retroactively Arabise Arabian
history, turning al- arab into the central protagonist of a complex mythology
which subsequent Muslim writers narrated to explain their history and their
place in the world.

11. Patricia Crone, Roman, Provincial, and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic
Patronate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–17.
12. Classic studies remain. Jane Idelman Smith, An Historical and Semantic Study of the Term
“Islām” as Seen in a Sequence of Qur ān Commentaries (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press,
1975); Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, “Faith in the Qur ān and Its Relationship to Belief,” in his
On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 110–134.
13. See, for example, Camilla Adang, “Belief and Unbelief,” EQ 1: 218–226, at 218; M.
M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam: Studies in Ancient Arab
Concepts (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 26–31. For a dissenting opinion, see Helmer Ringgren,
“The Conception of Faith in the Koran,” Oriens 4 (1951): 1–20. More generally, see
Toshihiko Izutsu, The Concept of Belief in Islamic Theology: A Semantic Analysis of
Imān and Islām (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1965).
14. There is a growing consensus among historians of early Islam and the Qur ān
that the emergence of Islam needs to be situated against the context of late an-
tiquity. Examples include Crone and Cook, Hagarism; Fowden, Before and After
Muhammad; Aziz al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and
198 Notes

His People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Tannous, The Making
of the Medieval Middle East; Sahner, Christian Martyrs Under Islam; and Angelika
Neuwirth, The Qur an and Late Antiquity: A Shared Heritage, trans. Samuel Wilder
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
15. Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in
Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 21–45.
16. Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, 231–271.
17. Philip Wood, “Paradigms of Religion and the Swift Birth of Islam: Wilfred
Cantwell Smith Revisited,” in What Is Islamic Studies?: European and North
American Approaches to a Contested Field, eds. Leif Stenberg and Philip Wood
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 154–175.
18. This would culminate, of course, in the legal concept of the ahl al-dhimma.
19. The usual suspects in this regard include Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Islam,
trans. F. M. Young (Madras: MDCSPK Press, 1835; repr. New York: Ktav, 1970).
Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1956 [1856]); Shlomo Dov Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts
Through the Ages (New York: Schocken, 1955); and Abraham I. Katsh, Judaism
in Islam: Biblical and Talmudic Backgrounds of the Koran and Its Commentaries
(New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1954). For requisite contextualization and crit-
icism, see my Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 36–61.
20. In terms of Judaism, see, for example, Daniel Boyarin, Border-Lines: The Partition of
Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Griffith,
The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque; Penn, Envisioning Islam; Tannous, The
Making of the Medieval Middle East; Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jewish-Christianity and
the History of Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018); Annette Yoshiko Reed and
Adam Becker, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity
and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
21. Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), xii.
22. See, for example, my “Religion Without Religion: Integrating Islamic Origins into
Religious Studies,” JAAR 85.4 (2017): 867–888.
23. For example, W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1953) and Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).
24. For example, Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). It certainly was a social movement because all
religions are social movements. I mention this here only because many are willing
to talk about the spiritual impetus behind Christianity (or Judaism) but are quick to
deny this to Islam.
25. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 58, 66, 79.
26. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 71.
27. al-Jā i , Kitāb al-bukhhalā , ed. . Al- ājirī (Cairo, 1967), 102.
28. Neuwirth, The Qur an and Late Antiquity, 1.
29. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 98–103.
 Notes 199

30. The criticism of Wansbrough and the “revisionist” school are too numerous to men-
tion. As I stated in the introduction, I am sympathetic to many of their findings and
much prefer them to a gullible reading of much later sources as transcripts of what
really happened. For the sake of this study, however, I am opting for a more sanguine
approach. A useful criticism may be found in François de Blois, “Islam in Its Arabian
Context,” in the Qur ān in Context, eds. A. Neuwirth et al., 615–624.
31. Neuwirth, The Qur an and Late Antiquity, 1.
32. Sidney Griffith, “Al-Nasārā in the Qur ān: A Hermeneutical Reflection,” in New
Perspectives on the Qur ān: The Qur ān in Its Historical Context, ed. Gabriel Said
Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2011), 301–322, at 318. On the role of na rānī more
generally in the Qur ān, see François de Blois, “Na rānī and anīf: Studies on the
Religious Vocabulary of Christianity and of Islam,” BSOAS 65.1 (2002): 1–30.
33. See, for example, Mehdy Shaddel, “Qur ānic ummī: Genealogy, Ethnicity, and the
Foundation of a New Community,” JSAI 42 (2016): 1–60.
34. Here the work of Christian J. Robin is essential. He remarks, for example, “dans le
judaïsme aux multiples variants des siècles qui précèdent ‘islam, il est difficile d’établir
à quel courant se rattachent les juifs d’Arabie.” See his “Himyar et Israël,” Comptes-
Rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 148.2 (2004): 831–
908, at 863.
35. There is a tendency in the secondary literature to assume that these other
monotheisms were either fully articulated or representative of more normative
Judaism and Christianity. See, for example, Neuwirth, The Qur an and Late Antiquity,
5, 29; Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 71. Much more likely, and as we shall
see in subsequent chapters, these communities would have been doctrinally inchoate
and theologically underdefined. In this regard, see the pioneering work of Christian
J. Robin, “Le judaïsme de imyar,” Arabia 1 (2003): 97–172; Robin, “Quel Judaïsme
en Arabie?,” in Le Judaïsme de l’Arabie Antique: Actes de Colloque de Jérusalem (février,
2006), ed. C. Robin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 15–295, at 63.
36. See the comments in Heribert Busse, Die theologischen Beziehungen des Islams zu
Judentum und Christentum: Grundlagen des Dialogs im Koran und die gegenwärtige
Situation (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 8–29.
37. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 8–10.
38. This is, in many ways, the main thesis of Steven M. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and
Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
39. Gabriel Said Reynolds, for example, writes that “the absence of direct quotations of
Jewish and Christian texts in the Qur ān reflects the paths these texts took to reach the
Qur ān’s author. . . . [T]he author of the Qur ān would have heard only descriptions
or paraphrases of such texts rendered into Arabic orally, most likely from the Semitic
language known as Aramaic.” See his The Qur ān and the Bible: Text and Commentary
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 3. He continues that “my argument
that the Qur ān is so closely, or organically, related to the Bible represents a depar-
ture from traditional ideas that the background of the Qur ān is largely pagan (and
partially Jewish)” (3). I certainly concur with his assessment here, but, as he notes
200 Notes

in the first quotation, the links between the two texts are often precarious. For other
attempts to find Christological motifs in the Qur ān and early Islam, see Samir Khalil
Samir, “The Theological Christian Influences on the Qur ān: A Reflection,” in The
Qur ān in Its Historical Context, ed. G. S. Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2008), 141–
162; Michael Marx, “Glimpses of Mariology in the Qur ān: From Hagiography to
Theology via Religious Polemic,” in The Qur ān in Context, eds. A. Neuwirth et al.,
533–564.
40. The Sabians (al- ābi ūn) are mentioned three times in the Qur ān (here, at Q 5/69,
and at Q 22/17). It is unclear who they were other than that they are portrayed as a
“People of the Book” (ahl-al-kitāb). In later Islamic literature, as we shall see in a sub-
sequent chapter, it became an ambiguous category into which could be lumped any
number of peoples, including converts.
41. Q 2/62. Quranic quotations, with slight modifications, come from The Qur ān: A New
Annotated Translation, trans. A. J. Droge (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013).
42. Cf., Q 4/50; 5/64; 45/16–17.
43. Q 5/51.
44. Q 5/16–17.
45. Though, to be clear, my only interest here is in the qur ānic context of these terms, not
their later extrapolations in the subsequent commentary tradition.
46. Camilla Adang, for example, writes that there “existed three issues frequently debated
between Muslims and Jews, viz., the abrogation of the Law, the proofs of Muhammad’s
prophethood, and the alleged misrepresentation of the contents of the Bible by Jews.
Biblical passages were adduced by our authors for a variety of reasons: to explain
the history of the Israelite prophets and patriarchs who were seen as Muhammad’s
predecessors; to illustrate the origins of Jewish beliefs and practices; to vindicate the
prophethood of Muhammad; and for polemical purposes, for example, to demon-
strate that the Torah had been abrogated or corrupted.” See her Muslim Writers on
Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996),
249–250.
47. One of the first major attempts to document all those places that previous scriptures
were tampered with may be found in Ibn azm, Kitāb al-fa l fī al-milal wa-al-
ahwā wa-al-ni al, eds. Muhammad Ibrāhīm Na r and Abd al-Ra man Umayra
(Jidda: Ukāz, 1982), 1: 116. For relevant context, see Adang, Muslim Writers on
Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, 59–69.
48. See Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, 223–225.
49. Compare with Q 2/151.
50. For elaboration, see chapter 3.
51. Q 4/160–162; cf., Q 5/12–14.
52. Q 4/171; cf., Q 5/75 and Q 19/19.
53. These dietary restrictions have been the matter of some debate as to whom they were
directed at and why. The debate need not concern us here, but those interested can
see the nice summary in Shaddel, “Qur ānic ummī,” 26–29; see also Holger Zellentin,
The Qur ān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure
 Notes 201

(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 140–154—though I disagree with his conclusions

that the Qur ān here adopts a set of Jewish Christian dietary regulations.
54. See Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 43–45.
55. According to Ibn Murajjā (d. 426/1034), “The Jews were delighted when Muhammad
and the People of the Book prayed facing Jerusalem [qibala bayt al-maqdis], but when
he turned his face to the direction of the Ka ba, they disapproved of it [qibala al-bayt
ankarū dhālika].” See his Fa ā il bayt al-maqdis wa al-khalīl wa fa ā il al-sham, ed. O.
Livne-Kafri (Shfaram: Al-Mashriq, 1995), 97.
According to Ibn Taymiyya, the qibla was changed to let the Jews know that the
early Muslims were not interested in being Jews. See his Iqti ā al- irā al-mustaqīm
li-mukhālafat a āb al-ja īm, ed. Na īr b. Abd al-Kārim al- Aql (Riyad: Maktabat al-
rushd, 1991), 1: 88.
56. See Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Qur ānic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and
Modern Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–9. Again, my in-
terest here is less to ascertain these qur ānic Christians so much as it is to ascertain
how they function in Islamic religious imaginations and Arabic literary traditions.
57. Much scholarly inquiry, however, has gone into surmising who they were and
what they believed. Recent examples include Pines, “Notes on Islam and on
Arabic Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity,” 135–152; Zellentin, The Qur ān’s
Legal Culture, 1–54; Patricia Crone, “Jewish Christianity and the Qur ān,” JNES 74
(2015): 225–253; Guy G. Stroumsa, “Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins,” in
Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone, eds. Behnam
Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein, and Robert Hoyland (Leiden: Brill,
2015), 72–96.
58. For recent attempts at uncovering these forms, now based largely on inscriptions
(many of which are dateable) and epigraphy, as opposed to the Qur ān and later literary
genres, see Robin, “Quel Judaïsme en Arabie?,” in Le Judaïsme de l’Arabie Antique: Actes
de Colloque de Jérusalem (février, 2006), ed. C. Robin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 15–
295; Iwona Gadja, Le royaume de imyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris, AIBL, 2009),
76–81; Gadja, “Remarks on Monotheism in Ancient South Arabia,” in Islam and Its
Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur an, eds. Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 247–256, at 248–249.
59. Though it might be worth noting here that, as we shall see in Part Two, this did not
stop subsequent Muslim commentators from trying to argue that pristine groups
of Jews and Christians functioned as pre-qur ānic Muslims. See, in this regard,
McAuliffe, Qur ānic Christians, 240–259.
60. Here it might be worth noting the linguistic ambiguity of Q 28/52: “Those to
whom we gave the scripture before it/him—they are believers in it/him.” For some
commentators, most notably Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209), the pronoun refers
to “him,” not “it,” and is a reference to Muhammad. By this, he interprets the verse
to refer to believers who believed in Muhammad even before he was born. See his
Tafsīr al-kabīr, 32 vols. (Cairo: al-Ma ba a al-Bahiyya al-Mi riyya, n.d.), 24: 262. See
McAuliffe, Qur ānic Christians, 240–242.
202 Notes

61. See the comments in Saleh, “The Epistemological Fallacy and Qur ānic Studies,”
658–665; for relevant secondary literature on the anīf, see Uri Rubin, “ anīf,” EQ
2: 402–403; Andrew Rippen, “R MN and the anīfs,” in Islamic Studies Presented to
Charles J. Adams, eds. Wael B. Hallaq and Donald P. Little (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 153–
168; more recently see François de Blois, “Na rānī and anīf,” 1–30.
62. On attempts at reconstruction, see Patricia Crone, “The Religion of the Qur ānic
Pagans: Gods and Lesser Deities,” Arabica 27.2/3 (2010): 151–200; Crone, “The
Qur ānic Mishrikūn and Revelation (Part I),” BSOAS 75.3 (2012): 445–472; Crone,
“Pagan Arabs as God Fearers,” in The Qur ānic Pagans and Related Matters: Collected
Studies in Three Volumes, eds. P. Crone and Hanna Siurua (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 315–
339. Crone’s basic thesis is that “the mushrikūn were monotheists who worshipped
the same God as the Messenger, but who also venerated lesser beings indiscrimi-
nately called gods and angels, including some identifiable Arabian deities and per-
haps also in some cases the sun and the moon.” See “The Religion of the Qur ānic
Pagans,” 177.
63. Requisite literature includes C. J. Lyall, “The Words ‘ anīf ’ and ‘muslim,’” JRAS 35
(1903): 771–784; D. S. Margoliouth, “On the Origins and Import of the Names muslim
and anīf,” JRAS 35 (1903): 467–493; Uri Rubin, “ anīfiyya and Ka ba: An Inquiry
in the Arabian Pre-Islamic Background of the dīn Ibrāhīm,” JSAI 13 (1990): 85–112;
François de Blois, “The Sabians [Sābi un] in Pre-Islamic Arabia,” AO 56 (1995): 39–61.
64. Cf. Q 2/135; 3/95; 4/125; 6/79; 16/120; 16/123; and 23/31.
65. Indeed, I am currently working on a major study that will suggest that one of the
communities that might have functioned as some sort of representative of the unafā
is that imyārite kingdom of South Arabia. The latter had control of the Arabian
Peninsula just prior to the advent of Islam. Moreover, they seem to have existed as
neither Jews nor Christians—despite the fact that the leadership seems to have con-
verted to some form of Judaism. In the meantime, see my “South Arabian ‘Judaism,’
imyārite Ra manism, and the Origins of Islam,” in Remapping Emergent Islam,
ed. Carlos Segovia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 15–43). See,
further, Christian J. Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late
Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 247–332.
66. See F. R. Buhl, “ anīf,” EI :258–260.
67. See Ibn Hishām, Kitāb sīrat rasūl Allāh, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Göttingen, 1858–
1860), 293. English translation may be found in The Life of Muhammad: A Translation
of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1955), 201; cf. 995 (Guillaume, 675).
68. For example, al-Hamdānī, Kitāb al-iklīl, ed. Muhammad ibn Alī al-Akwa
(Sana a: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa- l -Siyāha, 2004), 1: 129–131; Ibn al-Kalbī, Kitāb al-
a nām (Cairo, 1995); and al- abarī, Jami al-bayan an ta wīl ay qur ān (Beirut: Dār
al-fikr, 1984), 20: 91–95.
69. D. Gimaret, “Shirk,” EI2 9: 484–486. See, further, G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry
and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 24–25.
 Notes 203

70. See Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the Qur an: Semantics of the Qur anic
Weltanschauung (Tokyo: Kero University, 1964), 106–110; Izutsu, Ethico-Religious
Concepts in the Qur an (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press,
2002 [1959]), 130–133.
71. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam, 67–78. Crone also notes the
overlap between categories. See her “The Religion of the Qur ānic Pagans,” 153–155.
72. See, for example, the studies noted in n. 62 earlier.
73. Jacques Waardenurg, “The Early Period, 610–650,” in Muslim Perceptions of Other
Religions: A Historical Survey, ed. Jacques Waardenurg (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 3–17, at 4.
74. A. T. Welch, “Allah and Other Supernatural Beings: The Emergence of the Qur anic
Doctrine of Taw īd,” JAAR 47.4 (1979): 733–753.
75. Crone, “The Religion of the Qur’ānic Pagans,” 161–163.
76. For example, Q 17/111: “Say, ‘All praise to God, who has not taken a son, nor has
he any associate in the kingdom, nor has he any need of an ally (to protect Him)
from disgrace.’ Magnify Him (with all) magnitude [wa-quli l- amd li-llāhi lladhī
lam yattakhidh waladan wa-lam yakun lahū sharīkun fī l-mulki wa-lam yakun lahū
waliyyun mina al-dhulli wa-kabbirhu takbīra]”; cf. Q 5/72–73, 116.
77. Q 30/30–32.
78. Crone, “Pagan Arabs as God-Fearers,” 315.
79. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam, 67–87.
80. Waardenurg, “The Early Period,” 5.
81. See the comments in Fazlur Rahman, Major Themes of the Qur ān, 2nd ed.
(Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1989), 12–14; compare with Izutsu, Ethico-
Religious Concepts in the Qur ān, 119–155.
82. Q 7/194–198. Cf. 13/14 and 35/14.
83. Crone, “Pagan Arabs as God-Fearers,” 335.
84. On the ethical imperatives of, see Rahman, Major Themes, 96–98.
85. J. J. G. Jansen, “mu min,” EI2 7, 554–555, at 554.
86. This, of course, is Donner’s argument. See, for example, Muhammad and the
Believers, 109–114.
87. See the comments in Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts, 119–155.
88. Q 23/1–6.
89. See, for example, Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 68–74.
90. See Helmer Ringgren, “The Conception of Faith in the Koran,” esp. 1–5; Hawting,
The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam, 20–45.
91. Relevant background may be found in M. M. Bravmann, “On the Spiritual
Background of Early Islam and Its Principal Concepts,” Le Muséon 64 (1951): 317–
356; see also Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts, 119–127. See, more recently, Hasan
Ansari, Maribel Fierro, and Sabine Schmidtke, “Introduction,” in Accusations of
Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Perspective on Takfīr, eds. C. Adang, H. Ansari, M.
Fierro, and S. Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1–24.
92. For example, in Q 109/6, we read, “To you your religion, and to me my religion”
(lakum dīnukum wa-liya dīn).
204 Notes

93. Q 73/10. Cf. Q 86/17, where the believers are told “let the unbelievers be, let them be
for a little [while].”
94. Q 2/190–191.
95. Marilyn Waldman, “The Development of the Concept of Kufr in the Qur’an,” JAOS
88.3 (1968): 442–455, at 442.
96. Waldman, “The Development of the Concept of Kufr in the Qur’an,” 443.
97. Cf. Q 9/73–74; 48/6; 57/13–15; and 59/11–17.
98. See A. Brockett, “munafikūn,” EI2 7: 561–562, at 561.
99. Q 63/4–6.
100. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 411 (Guillaume, 277).
101. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 411 (Guillaume, 278).
102. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 546 (Guillaume, 363).
103. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 411–412 (Guillaume, 278).

Chapter 2

1. al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmi al-kabir, 3: 20 (no. 633).

2. al-Bukharī, al-Jāmi al-sa i 1: 280 (no. 876).
3. See Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1981), 82–90; also see E. Landau-Tasseron, “From Tribal Society
to Centralized Polity: An Interpretation of Events and Anecdotes of the Formative
Period of Islam,” JSAI 24 (2000): 180–216.
4. On the zeal of the armies associated with this new religion, see Shoemaker, The
Apocalypse of Empire, 3. Again, more generally, see Hoyland, In God’s Path, 8–30. He
reminds us that:
Wars are messy affairs—the composition of opposing sides and the reasons for
which they are fighting are often diverse and shifting. However, those who wage
the wars and those who document them have a strong interest in portraying the
situation as black and white: believers against infidels, good against evil, justice
and freedom against tyranny and oppression. (4)
5. According to Patricia Crone, “The total number of Arabs who left their homes
can hardly have exceeded, or even totaled, five hundred thousand. The con-
quered peoples numbered perhaps twenty to thirty million.” See her “The Early
Islamic World,” in War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval World: Asia, the
Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica, eds. K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein
(Cambridge, MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, 1999), 309–332, at 314. See further
her The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 8–9.
6. The classic work on conversion remains Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in
the Medieval Period, esp. 33–42.
7. See, for example, A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects: A
Critical Study of the Covenant of Umar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930);
 Notes 205

A. Fattal, Le statut legal des non-musulmans en pays d’islam; Hoyland, Seeing Islam
as Others Saw It; Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islamic Law. Of especial
significance to this chapter are Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque;
A. Papaconstantinou, “Between umma and dhimma: The Christians of the Middle
East Under the Umayyads,” Annales islamologiques 42 (2008): 127–56; and M. Levy-
Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire.
8. See Harry Munt, “‘No Two Religions’: Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic ijāz,”
BSOAS 78.2 (2015): 249–269, at 250–251. Indeed, one of the operative scholarly
assumptions is that after the conquests, other religions on the peninsula simply
disappeared—either folded into the umma or expelled.
9. Munt, “ ‘No Two Religions,’ ” 251. See further Tritton, Caliphs, 175–177; Seth Ward,
“A Fragment of an Unknown Work by al- abarī on the Tradition ‘Expel the Jews
and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula (and the Lands of Islam),’” BSOAS 53.3
(1990): 407–420; Marco Schöller, Exegetisches Denken und Prophetbiographie: Eine
quellenkritische Analyse der Sīra-Uberlieferung zu Muhammads Konflikt mit den
Juden (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1998), 313–353; Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion
in Islamic Law, 85–93.
10. Munt, “ ‘No Two Religions,’ ” 251. See further Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet,
197–265; Shoemaker, “Mu ammad,” in The Routledge Handbook on Early Islam, ed.
Herbert Berg (London: Routledge, 2018), 49–64, at 52–54.
11. Abd al-Razzāq al- an ānī, al-Mu annaf, ed. abīb Abd al-Ra man al-A amī
(Beirut: n.p., 1970–1972), 6: 53 (no. 9984); 10: 359 (no. 19367).
12. Munt, “ ‘No Two Religions,’ ” 256.
13. See Milka Levy-Rubin, “Were the Jews Prohibited from Settling in Jerusalem
Following the Arab Conquest? – The Authenticity of al- abarī’s Jerusalem
Surrender Agreement,” JSAI 36 (2009): 63–82.
14. Abū Bakr al-Khallāl, Ahl al-milal wa-al-ridda wa-al-zanādiqa wa-tārik al- alāt wa-
al-farā’i min Kitāb al-Jāmi , ed. I.H. Sul ān, 2 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Ma ārif,
1416/1996), 1: 195 (no. 330); al-Kawsaj, Kitāb al-masā il an imāmay ahl al- adīth
A mad b. anbal wa-Is āq b. Rāhwayh, ed. T.F. al-Hulwānī, 3 vols. (Cairo: al-Fārūq
al- adītha, 2005 [1426]), 3: 234 (no. 2832).
15. M. Khadduri, The Islamic Law of Nations: Shaybānī’s Siyar (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1966), 277–278. See Munt, “ ‘No Two Religions,’ ” 259.
16. See Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 68–70.
17. Mun’im Sirry, Scriptural Polemics: The Qur ān and Other Religions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 34–44. He writes that “Given the hostile environment in
which a new religion inevitably arises, it is not surprising to observe that the Qur ān
articulates its response sometimes in harsh language against older religious com-
munities that were trying to bring about the demise of a religion that it represents”
(35–36), though I would add that there is no historical evidence that other religions
were trying to do this. Once again, we see how the Qur ān is taken as a transcript of
what actually happened.
18. See, for example, Uri Rubin, “Apes, Pigs, and the Islamic Identity,” IOS 17
(1997): 89–105.
206 Notes

19. For example, Tritton, Caliphs, 175–176; Fattal, Statut légal, 88–90; Gordon D.
Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse Under
Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 97–108; Munt, “ ‘No
Two Religions,’ ” 260–264; A. Elad, “Community of Believers of ‘Holy Men’ and
‘Saints’ or Community of Muslims? The Rise and Development of Early Muslim
Historiography,” JSS 47.2 (2002): 241–308, at 296–297.
20. Moshe Sharon, “Praises of Jerusalem as a Source for the Early History of Islam,” BO 49
(1992): 55–67, at 58. See further Chase Robinson, Abd al-Malik (Oxford: Oneworld,
2005), 95–100.
21. See Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire, 116–120.
22. Sharon, “Praises of Jerusalem,” 58–60. See further Oleg Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome
of the Rock in Jerusalem,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959): 33–62; M. Rosen-Ayalon, The Early
Islamic Monuments of al-Haram aI-Sharif: An Iconographic Study (Jerusalem: Hebrew
University Press, 1989).
23. Munt, “ ‘No Two Religions,’ ” 266. See more fully Harry Munt, The Holy City of
Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 148–152.
24. See, for example, Abū Ismā īl al-Azdī, Kitāb futū al-shām, ed. Abd al-Mu nim
Amir (Cairo, 1970). For relevant context, see Suleiman A. Murad, “On Early
Islamic Historiography: Abū Ismā īl al-Azdī and His Futū al-Shām,” JAOS 120.4
(2000): 577–593.
25. M. J. Kister, “Do Not Assimilate Yourselves . . . Lā tashabbahū,” JSAI 12 (1989): 321–
327, at 324–325.
26. Abū Bakr al- ur ūshī, Kitāb al- awadīth wa- l-bida , ed. Mu ammad al- alībī
(Tunis, 1959), 13.
27. Abd al-Qādir al-Jilānī, al-Ghunya li- ālibī arīqa l- aqqi azza wa-jalla (Cairo, 1322),
2: 545 (no. 1102).
28. al-Jilānī, al-Ghuny, I.47.
29. For example, Al-Muttaqī l-Hindī, Kanz al-ummāl, 8: 129 (no. 921).
30. al- ur ūshī, Kitāb al- awadīth wa- l-bida , 59.
31. Al-Muttaqī al-Hindī, Kanz al-ummāl, 8: 112 (no. 809); see also al-Suyū ī, al-Durr al-
manthūr, 3: 156.
32. Kister, “Do Not Assimilate Yourselves,” 330.
33. Al-Suyī ī, al-Durr al-manthūr, 3: 227; al-Dhahabī, Mīzān al-i tidāl, ed. Ali
Muhammad al-Bījawī (Cairo, 1963 [1382]), 3: 299. See further Kister, “Do Not
Assimilate Yourselves,” 330–335. See further Ignaz Goldziher, “Usages Juifs d’après la
littérature religieuse des Musulmans,” REJ 28 (1894): 75–94.
34. For example, Ibn Sa d, al- abaqāt al-kubrā (Beirut, 1957), 4: 254; al- abarī, Tārīkh
(Beirut, 1967), 5: 161; Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa ’l-nihāya (Cairo, 1932), 8: 16; Shihāb
al-Dīn, Muthīr al-gharām (Jaffa, 1946), 23; Mujīr al-Dīn, al-Uns al-jalīl (Amman,
1973), 1: 263. For requisite secondary literature, see S. D. Goitein, “Jerusalem During
the Arab Period,” in Jerusalem Researches of Eretz Israel (Jerusalem, 1953), 82–103;
Suliman Bashear, “Qibla Mushariqqa and Early Muslim Prayer in Churches,” MW
81 (1991): 267–282; Claude Gilliot, “Christians and Christianity in Islamic Exegesis,”
 Notes 207

in Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 1, eds. David Thomas et al. (Leiden: Brill,

2009), 31–56.
35. Ibn al-Bi rīq, Tārīkh (Beirut, 1909), 2: 12–19; see also Tritton, Caliphs, 52.
36. Quoted in Bashear, “Qibla Mushariqqa and Early Muslim Prayer in Churches,” 276.
37. Bashear, “Qibla Mushariqqa and Early Muslim Prayer in Churches,” 281–282. See,
further, Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, 197–250.
38. Here I differ from the likes of Gordon D. Newby and Haggai Mazuz, who take these
later projections as tantamount to real communities of Jews and Muslims. According
to Mazuz, “Our findings demonstrate that the Medinan Jews were Talmudic-Rabbinic
Jews in almost every respect. Their sages believed in using homiletic Interpretation
(derash) of the Scriptures, as did the sages of the Talmud. On many halakhic issues,
their observations were identical to those of the Talmudic sages. In addition, they
held Rabbinic beliefs, sayings, and motifs derived from Midrashic literature.” See his
The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of Medina (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 99. But of
course we have no evidence for any of this. In like manner, Newby writes that these
Jews “identified with Jewish interests and concerns outside Arabia and expressed
their interests in correct practice to authorities beyond their local rabbis and commu-
nity leaders,” though what “correct” Jewish belief or practice meant in the context of
the late sixth and early seventh centuries is anything but clear. See his A History of the
Jews of Arabia, 54.
39. See, for example, Michael Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina”: Mu ammad’s First
Legal Document (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004); Uri Rubin, “The ‘Constitution
of Medina’: Some Notes,” SI 62 (1985): 5–23; Fred Astren, “Re-Reading the Arabic
Sources: Jewish History and the Muslim Conquests,” JSAI 36 (2009): 83–130.
40. The imyār kingdom of Yemen or South Arabia, for example, seems to have es-
tablished this in the century prior to the advent of Islam. See my “South Arabian
‘Judaism,’ imyārite Ra manism, and the Origins of Islam,” in Remapping
Emergent Islam: Texts, Social Settings, and Ideological Trajectories, ed. Carlos Segovia
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 15–43.
41. Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina,” 3. Here he departs from the study of Serjeant,
who argued, I also think unconvincingly, that the constitution was composed
of several distinct strata. See R. B. Serjeant, “The ‘Constitution of Medina,’” IQ 8
(1964): 3–16.
42. According to Gil, following Wellhausen, most Jews mentioned in the document are
referred to as “Jews of ” a particular Arab tribe (e.g., yahūd banī awf, yahūd banī ’l-
najjār). He also argues that the “great” Jewish tribes of Medina had largely been left out
on account of the early community’s increased anti-Jewish policy, which was coming
into effect at this point. See Julius Wellhausen, “Muhammads Gemeindeordnung von
Medina,” in Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, vol. 4, ed. Julius Wellhausen (Berlin: G. Reimer,
1889), 65–83; and Moshe Gil, “The Constitution of Medina: A Reappraisal,” IOS 5
(1974): 44–65.
43. A text that dates at least 150 years after the hijra of Muhammad and his early followers
to Medina. See later.
44. Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina,” ix.
208 Notes

45. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 341 (Guillaume, 231–232, with modification).
46. Lecker, The “Constitution of Medina,” 3.
47. Rubin, “The ‘Constitution of Medina,’ ” 13.
48. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 342 (Guillaume, 232, with modification).
49. As, for example, is the goal of Muhammad Hamidullah, The First Written Constitution
in the World: An Important Document of the Time of the Holy Prophet, 3rd rev. ed.
(Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1975 [1394]).
50. On the difference between “Jews” and “Muslims” in the period, see my “South Arabian
‘Judaism,’ imyarite Ra manism, and the Origins of Islam,” 19–22.
51. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 343 (Guillaume, 233, with modification).
52. For requisite secondary literature, see Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim
Subjects, 5–17; Fattal, Statut légal, 60–69; A. Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme zwischen
Muslimen und Nichtmuslimen: die Bedingungen, Umars (ash-shurū al- umariyya)
unter einem anderen Aspekt gelesen,” JSAI 9 (1987): 290–315; Mark R. Cohen, “What
Was the Pact of Umar?: A Literary-Historical Study,” JSAI 23 (1999): 100–131; Milka
Levy-Rubin, “The Pact of Umar,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical
History (600–900), vol. 1, ed. D. Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 360–364; Milka Levy-
Rubin, “Shurū Umar and Its Alternatives: The Legal Debate on the Status of the
Dhimmīs,” JSAI 30 (2005): 170–206; and, more generally, her Non-Muslims in the
Early Islamic Empire.
53. The document, including various versions of it, may be found in Abu Bakr al-Khallāl,
Ahl al-milal wa-l-ridda wa-l-zanādiqa wa-tārik al- ala wa-l-farā i min Kitāb al-
Jāmi , ed. I. H. Sul ān (Riyadh, 1996), 2: 431–435.
54. Cohen, “What Was the Pact of Umar?,” 100.
55. Tritton, Caliphs, 10.
56. Tritton, Caliphs, 10–12.
57. Online at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/pact-umar.asp.
58. Abd al-Razzāq, Mu annaf, 10: 320.
59. See Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 353–399.
60. Levy-Rubin, “The Pact of Umar,” 362.
61. See Levy-Rubin, “Shurū Umar and Its Alternatives,” 174–180; Astren, “Re-reading
the Arabic Sources,” 91–93.
62. Parts of this section rework my Muslim and Jew: Origins, Growth, Resentment
(London: Routledge, 2018), 22–24.
63. Relevant secondary studies include Uri Rubin, In the Eye of the Beholder; Gordon D. Newby,
The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhmmad
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Harald Motzki, Analysing Muslim
Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī adīth (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Motzki,
Reconstruction of a Source of Ibn Is āq’s Life of the Prophet and Early Qur ān Exegesis: A
Study of Early Ibn Abbās Traditions (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017).
64. Stories generally regarded to be of foreign provenance; though most are Jewish,
they could derive from Christian, Zoroastrian, and other sources. In this regard, see
Roberto Tottoli, “The Origin and Use of the Term isrā īliyyat in Muslim Literature,”
Arabica 46.2 (1999): 193–210.
 Notes 209

65. Muhammad Wahīb, Al-isrā īliyyat fī tafsīr al-Qur ān (Beirut, 2007), 50–55. See also
Ramzi Na nā a, Al-isrā īliyyat wa-atharuhā fī kutum al-tafsīr (Damascus/Beirut,
1970), 71–75.
66. Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet, 3–4.
67. For some of the problems involved in this, see Harald Motzki, Reconstruction of a
Source of Ibn Is āq’s Life of the Prophet and Early Qur ān Exegesis, 9–19.
68. See, for example, Andrew Rippin, “The Function of ‘Asbāb al-nuzūl’ in Qur ānic
Exegesis,” BSOAS 51.1 (1988): 1–20
69. See Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 147–156.
70. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl allāh, 102 (Guillaume, 69).
71. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl allāh, 115 (Guillaume, 79).
72. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl allāh, 1: 116 (Guillaume, 80).
73. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl allāh, 1: 116–117 (Guillaume, 80).
74. The story is repeated in al- abarī, Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje,
3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901), 1: 1123–1126; English translation in The History
of al- abarī, vol. 6: Muhammad at Mecca, trans. W. Montgomery Watt with M. V.
McDonald (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 44–46.
75. Ibn ishām, Sīrat rasūl allāh, 362 (Guillaume, 246).
76. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 1113–1123 (English translation in Muhammad at Mecca, 38–43).
77. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 1126–1127 (English translation in Muhammad at Mecca, 47).
78. See Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 162–164.
79. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 1144 (English translation in Muhammad at Mecca, 64).
80. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 646; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol. 4: The
Ancient Kingdoms, trans. Moshe Perlmann (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1985), 44.
81. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 658 (English translation in The Ancient Kingdoms, 56).
82. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 659 (English translation in The Ancient Kingdoms, 56).
83. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 647 (English translation in The Ancient Kingdoms, 45).
84. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 1209-1210 (English translation in Muhammad at Mecca, 125).

Chapter 3

1. Ibn Taymiyya, Majmu al-fatāwa, eds. Amir al-Jazzār and Anwār al-Bāz, 4th ed., 22
vols. (Beirut: Dār al- azm, 2011), 15: 54.
2. Sayyid Qutb, Fī ilāl al-Qur ān, 10th ed., 6 vols. (Beirut: Dār al Shuruq, 1982), 2: 904.
3. My thinking here has been informed by Patrick J. Geary, Myth of Nations: The Medieval
Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Burton L. Mack,
The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2001);
Timothy Kubal, Cultural Movements and Cultural Memory: Christopher Columbus
and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008);
Erwin F. Cook, The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1995).
210 Notes

4. The obvious parallel here is the situation in early Christianity. See, for example, David
Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 5–8. See, further, Boyarin, Border Lines, 1–35.
5. Brakke, The Gnostics, 5–6.
6. Boyarin, Border Lines, 2.
7. Though I shall survey relevant secondary literature later, one of the more sugges-
tive literary approaches to analyzing the jāhiliyya remains the overlooked Jaroslav
Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 17–29.
8. Though Goldziher and others translate it as the “Age of Barbarism.” See Ignaz
Goldziher, Muslim Studies, ed. S. M. Stern, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967–1971), 1: 202; F. E. Peters, The Hajj (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 21, 36; and Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts
in the Qur ān, 228. Robert G. Hoyland translates it as “a pagan era when impetuous
passions (jahl) were, from a pious Muslim point of view, little tempered by wise for-
bearance ( ilm).” See his Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of
Islam (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 9.
9. Peter Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah: Uncertain Times of Uncertain Meanings,” DI 91.1
(2014): 69–94, at 70.
10. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 14.
11. Michael Cook, “The Emergence of Islamic Civilization,” in The Origins and Diversity
of Axial Age Civilization, ed. S. Eisenstadt (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1986), 476–483, at 478–481.
12. See, for example, Glen W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the
Eve of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 78–91; Hoyland, Arabia and
the Arabs, 167–197; Daniel T. Potts, “Trans-Arabian Routes of the Pre-Islamic
Period,” in The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam, ed. F. E. Peters (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999), 3: 45–80.
13. Indeed, as many scholars who work on the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula have
clearly shown, the period was certainly marked by civilizations, and sometimes even
powerful ones. See, for example, Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 1–12. On the im-
pressive “Jewish” kingdom of imyār in Yemen or South Arabia, see, for example,
Christian J. Robin, “ imyar et Israël,” 831–906; Robin, “Quel Judaïsme en Arabie?,”
15–295.
14. Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah: Uncertain Times of Uncertain Meanings.” This presents some of
the findings of his doctoral dissertation, “Creating Arab Origins: Muslim Constructions
of al-Jāhiliyya and Arab History” (PhD diss., University of London, SOAS, 2014).
15. Most famously in Sayyid Qutb’s commentary Ma‘ālim fī al- arīq (“Milestones”).
Qutb uses the term to refer, among other things, to non-Muslim political rule that
must be overthrown. See Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and
Modern Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 1–15; more recently,
Andrew F. March, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic
Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 122–129.
 Notes 211

16. Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah,” 71.

17. See “djāhiliyya,” EI2 2: 383–384, at 383.
18. Al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, Dīwān, ed. Mu ammad Abū al-Fa l Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Dār
al-Ma ārif, 1990), 199. Compare with Imru al-Qays, Dīwān, ed. Mu ammad Abū al-
Fa l Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Dār al-Ma ārif, 1990), 256.
19. Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur ān, 55–73; Rahman, Major Themes,
132–145.
20. Though it is worth noting that many translations render al-jāhiliyya al-ūlā in this
verse rather ambiguously and certainly not uniformly. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, for
example, translates it as “the pagan past” in The Qur ān (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 268; Richard Bell as “former paganism” in The Qur ān (Edinburgh: T &
T Clark, 1939), 2: 414; and A. J. Arberry as “pagans of old” in The Koran Interpreted
(London: George Allen, 1955), 2: 124; or just as “time of ignorance,” as Mohammed
Marmaduke Pickthall does in The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (New York: New
American Library, 1959), 303. It is clear, however, that the adjective ūlā is modifying
jāhiliyya. Droge translates it as “the former ignorance” (277).
21. This is seen, for example, in the brief quotation by Sayyid Qutb that begins this
chapter.
22. Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah,” 73.
23. al-Tirmidhī, Jāmi al-Tirmidhī (al-Riyadh: Dār al-Salām, 1999), Tafsīr 34.3.
24. Most famously, see Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), which argues for the widespread fabrication of adīth
in the second/eighth century. For a counterview, see Muhammad M. Azami, On
Schacht’s Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (al-Riyadh: King Saud University,
1985). More recently, see Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the
Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 197–239.
25. Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah,” 74–75.
26. Webb, “Al-Jāhiliyyah,” 74.
27. Jamāl al-Dīn Mu ammad ibn Man ūr, Lisān al- Arab (Beirut: Dar Sādir, 1990),
11: 130.
28. Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, Tafsīr al-Qur ān al- a īm, ed. Abd Allāh Ma mūd a-Sha āta
(Cairo: al-Hay at al-Mi riyya al- Amma li-l-Kutub, 1979–1989), 1: 482–483.
29. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 1: 483, 2: 488.
30. Mu ammad ibn Jarīr al- abarī, Tafsīr Jāmi al-bayān an ta wīl āy al-Qur ān (Tafsīr
al- abarī), ed. idqī Jamīl al- Attār (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1999), 26: 135.
31. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 261–268.
32. Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough, 57.
33. Stetkevych, Muhammad and the Golden Bough, 3.
34. Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael
Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 39–47;
Shari L. Lowin, The Making of a Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical
Narratives (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 218–227; Cornelia Schöck, Adam im Islam: Ein
Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Sunna (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1993), 12–17.
212 Notes

35. Hishām ibn al-Kalbī, Kitab al-a nam, ed. A mad Mu ammad Ubayd (Abu Dhabi: al-
Majma al-Thaqāfī, 2003), 31–32; English translation in Hisham ibn al-Kalbī, The Book
of Idols, trans. Nabih Amin Faris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 4.
36. Ibn al-Kalbī, Kitab al-a nam, 32; al-Kalbi, The Book of Idols, 5.
37. Stetkevych, Mu ammad and the Golden Bough, 6.
38. Stetkevych, Mu ammad and the Golden Bough, 6; Stetkevych, The Hunt in Arabic
Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University
Press, 2016), 91–129. See more generally James T. Monroe, “Oral Composition in
Pre-Islamic Poetry,” JAL 3 (1972): 1–53.
39. Stetkevych, Mu ammad and the Golden Bough, 6–7; see further Stefan Sperl, “The
Qur ān and Arabian Poetry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qur ānic Studies, eds.
Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2020), 401–417.
40. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 243–247, an idea that was picked up and expanded
upon in Webb, Imagining the Arabs, esp. 138–140.
41. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 188–190; Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 229–245;
and Abdulla El Tayib, “Pre-Islamic Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Arabic
Literature: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. A. F. L. Beeston,
T. M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 27–113, at 104–109.
42. Rina Drory, “The Abbasid Construction of al-Jāhiliyya: Cultural Authority in the
Making,” Studia Islamica 83 (1996): 33–49; see also Beatrice Gruendler, “Abbasid
Poets and the Qur ān,” in The Qur ān and Adab: The Shaping of Literary Traditions in
Classical Islam, ed. Nuha Alshaar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 137–169;
see also Sperl, “The Qur ān and Arabic Poetry” .
43. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and
Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 245–248. In this regard,
see also the work of J. Stetkevych, The Hunt in Arabic Poetry, 35–57.
44. Suzanne Stetkevych, “The Abbasid Poet Interprets History: Three Qa īdahs by Abū
Tammām,” JAL 10 (1979): 49–64.
45. Ibn Rashiq al-Qayrawānī, al- Umdah fī ma āsin al-shi r wa-ādābihi wa-naqdihi, ed.
Mu ammad Mu yī al-Dīn Abdu ’l- amīd (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 4th printing 1972),
1: 20. Quoted in S. Stetkevych, “The Abbasid Poet Interprets History,” 49 (with some
modification).
46. See, for example, Peter Heath, “Some Facets of Poetry in Pre-modern Historical
and Pseudo-Historical Texts,” in Poetry and History: The Value of Poetry in
Reconstructing Arab History, eds. Ramzi Baalbaki, Saleh Said Agha, and Tarif Khalidi
(Beirut: American University of Beirut, 2011), 39–60.
47. S. Stetkevych, “The Abbasid Poet Interprets History,” 51.
48. S. Stetkevych, “The Abbasid Poet Interprets History,” 51.
49. Dīwān Abī Tammām, Qa īdah no. 3 in 1: 40–74. Quoted in S. Stetkevych, “The
Abbasid Poet Interprets History,” 61.
50. On the Qur ān and its berating of poets, see F. Gabrieli, “Religious Poetry in Early
Islam,” in Arabic Poetry: Theory and Development, ed. G. E. von Grunebaum
 Notes 213

(Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1973), 1–17; Irfan Shahid, “Another Contribution to

Koranic Exegesis: The Sura of the Poets (XXVI),” JAL 14.3 (1983): 1–21; Michael
Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); James E. Montgomery, The Vagueness of the
Qa īdah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 210–216.
51. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 35–40; in this regard, see also Tannous, The Making of the
Medieval Middle East, 525–531.
52. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 11–12; 63–66.
53. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 243.
54. See, for example, the passage quoted by Ibn Kalbī mentioned earlier.
55. See, further, Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire, 8–14.
56. James E. Montgomery, Sarah Bowen Savant, and Peter Webb, “Introduction” to Ibn
Qutaybah, The Excellence of the Arabs, ed. James E.Montgomery and Peter Webb,
trans. Sarah Bowen Savant and Peter Webb (New York: New York University Press,
2017), xii. This sense of creating an imagined sense of mythic origins predicated on
an ethnos as opposed to a religion makes more sense to me than does the thesis of
Donner, encountered in chapter 1.
57. Montgomery, Savant, and Webb, “Introduction,” xii.
58. While “ethnicity” is certainly a modern concept, I use it here to denote the growing
need to find a sense of Arab unity that was not simply reducible to religion.
59. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 63–64.
60. Montgomery, Savant, and Webb, “Introduction,” xiv.
61. See Roy P. Mottahedeh, “The Shu ūbīyah Controversy and the Social History of
Early Islamic Iran,” IJMES 7 (1976): 161–182; Patricia Crone, “Post-Colonialism
in Tenth Century Islam,” DI 83.1 (2006): 2–38. More generally, see Sarah Bowen
Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
62. For example, Q 49/13.
63. Classic literature on the Shu ūbiyya includes Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, ed. S.
M. Stern (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), 1: 40–44; H. A. R. Gibb, “The Social Significance of
the Shuubiya,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam, eds. Stanford J. Shaw and William
R. Polk (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 62–73. On its association with Persian elites, see E. G.
Browne, A Literary History of Persia (London: Unwin, 1909), 1: 268. More recently,
see Sarah Bowen Savant, “Naming Shu ūbīs,” in Essays in Islamic Philology, History,
and Philosophy, eds. Alireza Korangy, Wheeler M. Thackston, Roy P. Mottahedeh,
and William Granara (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 166–184. One of the better-known
Shu ūbīs is the Andalusī ibn García (d. 1024). In this regard, see The Shu’ubiyya in
al-Andalus. The Risala of Ibn Garcia and Five Refutations, trans. with an introduction
and notes by James T. Monroe (Berkeley: University of California Press 1970); also
see Göran Larsson, Ibn García’s Shu ūbiyyah Letter: Ethnic and Theological Tensions in
Medieval al-Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
64. Savant, “Naming Shu ūbīs,” 166.
65. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l-tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 6–7.
214 Notes

66. See Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, 223–248.
67. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l-tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 18–19.
68. Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands, 76–93.
69. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l -tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 108–109.
70. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l-tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 150–151.
71. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l -tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 150–151.
72. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l -tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 150–151.
73. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l -tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 156–157.
74. Ibn Qutayba, Fa l al- Arab wa l -tanbīh alā ulūmihā, 214–215.
75. Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 9–10.
76. A mad ibn Abī al-Ya qūbī, Tārīkh al-Ya qūbī (Beirut: Dār al ādir, n.d.), 1: 223.
77. al-Ya qūbī, Tārīkh al-Ya qūbī, 1: 226.
78. al-Ya qūbī, Tārīkh al-Ya qūbī, 1: 226. See Webb, Imagining the Arabs, 268.
79. A mad ibn Ya ya al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, eds. I sān Abbās et al.
(Beirut: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1979), 1: 289–293.
80. For requisite background, see Walter Werkmeister, Quellenuntersuchungen zum Kitāb
al- Iqd al-farīd des Andalusiers Ibn Abdrabbih (246/860–328/940) (Berlin, 1983), 1–
22; also Maribel Fierro, “La política religiosa de Abd al-Ra mān III,” Al-Qantara 25
(2004): 119–156.
81. A mad b. Mu ammad ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, ed. A. Amīn, with an in-
troduction by U. Tadmurī, 7 vols. (Beirut, 1990), 1: 16; English translation in The
Unique Necklace, vol. 1, trans. R. Allen (Reading: Garnet, 2007), 2. See further
Isabel Toral-Niehoff, “The ‘Book of the Pearl on the Ruler’ in The Unique Necklace
by Ibn Abdrabbih: Preliminary Remarks,” in Global Medieval: Mirrors of Princes
Reconsidered, eds. Regula Forster and Neguin Yavari (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 134–150, at 136–137.
82. Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 1: 15–16; English translation in The Unique
Necklace, vol. 3, trans. I. J. Boulatta (Reading: Garnet, 2007), 1.
83. Toral-Niehoff, “The ‘Book of the Pearl on the Ruler’ in The Unique Necklace by Ibn
Abdrabbih,” 137–138.
84. Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 3: 268; The Unique Necklace, 230.
85. Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 3: 268; The Unique Necklace, 229.
86. Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 3: 268; The Unique Necklace, 230.

Chapter 4

1. Sunan Abī Dāwūd, book 2 (no. 262).

2. a ī Bukharī, book 65 (no. 4485).
3. There have been various attempts to do this in recent years, with varying degrees of
success. Most important is the work of Christian J. Robin. See, in particular, his “Arabia
and Ethiopia,” 247–332; Robin, “A propos de la prière: Emprunts lexicaux à l’hébreu
et à l’araméen relevés dans les insriptions préislamiques de l’Arabie méridionale et
 Notes 215

dans le Coran,” in Prières méditerranéennes hier et aujourd’hui (Actes du colloque

organisé par le Centre Paul-Albert Février à Aix-en-Provence les 2 et 3 avril 1998), eds.
Gilles Dorival and Didier Pralon (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de
Provence, 2000), 45–69; Robin, “ imyar et Israël,” 831–908; Robin, “Quel Judaïsme
en Arabie?,” 5–295. In this regard, see also Iwona Gajda, Le royaume de imyar à
l’époque monothéiste. Less successful attempts include the aforementioned Newby, A
History of the Jews of Arabia, and Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of
Medina.
4. Despite the fact that the imyārite kingdom of South Arabia, for example, had po-
litical autonomy and whose rulers identified with some kind of Judaism, they rarely
figure in our narratives documenting the history of late antique Jews and Judaism. See,
for example, the omission in the otherwise excellent work Peter Schäfer, The History
of the Jews in Antiquity, trans. David Chowcat (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1995). Though see Iwona Gajda, “Quel monothéisme en Arabie du Sud
ancienne?,” in Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux 5th et 6th siècles, eds. J. Beuacamp, F.
Briquel-Chatonnet, and C. J. Robin (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire
et civilisation de Byzance, 2010), 107–120.
5. See Averil Cameron, “The Jews in Seventh-Century Palestine,” SCI 13 (1994): 75–93.
6. Surprisingly, or perhaps tellingly, neither the Mishnah nor the Talmud—the two
major sources of rabbinic Judaism—makes much mention of them. See Josè Costa,
“Early Islam as a Messianic Movement: A Non-Issue?,” in Remapping Emergent
Islam: Texts, Social Settings, and Ideological Trajectories, ed. Carlos Segovia
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 45–82). I would like to thank Prof.
Costa for sending me a copy of his paper prior to publication.
7. Indeed, as Shaye Cohen notes, “in the second to sixth centuries, the rabbis were not
nearly as dominant as they would become later, and the concept ‘the rabbinic period’
slights the rabbis’ opponents (the losers) and falsely implies that after 70 CE all Jews ac-
cepted the rabbis as their leaders and followed the way of rabbinic Judaism.” See Shaye
J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox Press, 2006), 6, c.f., 205–224. See, more recently, Talya Fishman, who
pushes the period of rabbinic normativity to the medieval period in her Becoming
the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
8. Egregious examples of this approach may be found in Geiger, Judaism and Islam;
Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3; Charles Cutler Torrey, The Jewish Foundation of
Islam (New York: Bloch, 1933); Katsh, Judaism in Islam; Goitein, Jews and Muslims;
Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. Aaron Klein and Jenny Machlowitz
Klein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973–1984), 3 vols.
A nice corrective to these approaches, which, perhaps not surprisingly, tends to come
from outside the field of Jewish studies, is the pioneering work of A. F. L. Beeston,
in particular his “Himyarite Monotheism,” in Studies in the History of Arabia, eds.
Abdelgadir M. Abdalla, Sami al-Sakkar, Richard T. Morter, Abd al-Rahman al-
Ansary, and Gami at al-Malik Sa ūd (Riyadh: King Saud University Press, 1984),
2: 149–154; Beeston, “Judaism and Christianity in Pre-Islamic Yemen,” in L’Arabie
216 Notes

du Sud: Histoire et Civilisation, eds. Joseph Chelhod and R. Bayle des Hermens
(Paris: Maisonneuve Larose, 1984), 1: 271–278.
9. While scholars of early Christianity have shown this was definitely not the case,
the same has unfortunately not been done when it comes to Islam. On the former,
see, for example, Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); more recently, see the collec-
tion of essays in Reed, Jewish Christianity and the History of Judaism, 15–55.
10. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 143.
11. John Wansbrough, “Review of Josef van Ess, Anfänge muslimischer Theologie: Zwei
antiqadaritische Traktate aus dem ersten Jahrhundert der Higra,” BSOAS 43 (1980): 361–
363, at 361.
12. J. B. Segal, Edessa: “The Blessed City” (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2005 [1970]), 200–201;
Sidney H. Griffith, “Bashīr/Bēsēr: Boon Companion of the Byzantine Emperor Leo
III: The Islamic Recensions of His Story in Leiden Oriental MS 951 (2),” Le Muséon 103
(1990): 293–327.
13. Barbara Roggema, The Legend of Sergius Ba īrā: Eastern Christian Apologetics and
Apocalyptic in Response to Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2009). See also Hoyland, Seeing Islam
as Others Saw It, 505–511.
14. Roggema, The Legend of Sergius Ba īrā, 298–299.
15. Roggema, The Legend of Sergius Ba īrā, 302–307.
16. Moshe Gil, “The Story of Ba īrā and Its Jewish Versions,” in Hebrew and Arabic Studies
in Honour of Joshua Blau, ed. Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Hebrew University
Press, 1993), 193–210.
17. Quoted in Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 506.
18. On this trope, especially during the Spanish Inquisition, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews
of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-
Jewish Martyrdom in Iberian Lands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
19. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 351 (Guillaume, 239).
20. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 351–352 (Guillaume, 239–240).
21. “The trickster,” according to Radin, “is at one and the same time creator and destroyer,
giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself. He wills nothing
consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulse over
which he has no control; he knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both.
He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites,
yet through his actions all values come into being.” See Paul Radin, The Trickster: A
Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken, 1956), xxiii. See further
C. W. Spinks, “Trickster and Duality,” in Trickster and Ambivalence: The Dance of
Differentiation, ed. C. W. Spinks (Madison, WI: Atwood, 2001), 7–19.
22. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 394 (Guillaume, 267).
23. Ibn Hishām, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 395 (Guillaume, 267). See also a ī Bukharī, book 84
(no. 48).
24. Ibn Is āq, Sīrat rasūl Allāh, 669 (Guillaume, 450).
 Notes 217

25. Abū Dawūd, Sunan, eds. Sh. Al-Arna’ū and Kāmil Qarah Balilī (Damascus, 2009),
6: 144 (no. 4031).
26. Jami al-Tirmidhī, 4: 425 (no. 2695).
27. According to Noth, for example, such statements served as warnings to
Muslims to avoid being swallowed up by conquered peoples. See Albrecht Noth,
“Problems of Differentiation Between Muslims and Non-Muslims: Re-reading
the Ordinances of Umar (al-Shurū al- umariyya),” in Muslims and Others
in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert G. Hoyland (London: Routledge, 2004), at
119–121.
28. Uri Rubin, “Apes, Pigs, and the Islamic Identity,” esp. 89–92.
29. Ibn Abd al-Barr, Jāmi bayan al- ilm wa-fadlihi, 2: 53.
30. Abd al-Razzāq, al-Musannaf, 10: 311 (no. 19209).
31. Abd al-Razzāq, al-Musannaf, 1: 358 (no. 1390).
32. a ī Bukharī, book 60 (no. 125).
33. Sunan Abī Dāwūd, book 2 (no. 262).
34. a ī Muslim, book 3 (no. 160).
35. a ī Bukharī, vol. 1, book 8 (no. 86 or 428).
36. a ī Muslim, book 24, hadith 524; Sunan al-Nisa’i, book 48 (no. 202).
37. See here the comments in Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of Medina,
e.g., 25–26, though I would not go nearly so far as him as to claim that this is a “unique
methodology” that somehow enables him to ascertain what the Jews of Medina actu-
ally did or believed (7). He claims that “The juxtaposition of Islamic sources together
with Jewish sources, often demonstrates Islam’s attempt to differentiate itself from
Talmudic law in many areas” (26).
38. a ī Bukharī, book 65 (no. 4485).
39. See my “Arabian Judaism at the Advent of Islam: A Forgotten Chapter in the History
of Judaism,” in A Companion to Jews and Judaism in the Late Antique World, 3rd
Century BCE–7th Century CE, eds. Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 291–304.
40. Sunan ibn Majah, book 5, (no. 1136).
41. Jami al-Tirmidhī, vol. 5, book 47 (no. 3212).
42. a ī Bukharī, book 65 (no. 4706).
43. Israel Friedländer, “ Abd Allāh ibn Sabā, der Begründer der Sī a, und seine jüdischer
Ursprung,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie A 23 (1909): 296–327 and 24 (1910): 1–46.
Most recently, see Sean W. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic: Ibn Saba’ and the
Origins of Shi ism (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Though not important to my argument here,
it is perhaps worth pointing out that his Jewish bona fides have been questioned by
some. Most notable is Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “ Abd Allāh ibn Saba ,” EI2 1: 51;
Hodgson, “How Did the Early Shī a Become Sectarian?,” JAOS 75 (1955): 1–12. For
other sources see the footnotes immediately following.
44. See my South Arabian “Judaism, imyarite Ra manism, and the Origins of Islam,” 23–30.
45. al- abarī, Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1879–
1901), 1: 2942; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol. 15: The Crisis of the
218 Notes

Early Caliphate, trans. R. Stephen Humphreys (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1985), 145–146.
46. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2922–2923 (Humphreys, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, 126).
47. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 3027 (Humphreys, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, 225).
48. William Frederick Tucker, Mahdis and Millenarians: Shī ite Extremists in Early
Muslim Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10–12.
49. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 2–4.
50. More generally, see Heinz Halm, Das islamische Gnosis: Die extreme Schia und
Alawiten (Zürich: Artemis and Winkler, 1982), 33–42; Josef van Ess, Das Kitāb an-
Nak des Na ām und seine Rezeption im Kitāb al-Futyā des Ğāhiz; eine Sammlung der
Fragmente mit Übersetzung und Kommentar (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1972), 50–57. Most important, however, is Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic.
51. See chapter 6.
52. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 2.
53. On the ghulāt more generally, see Mushegh Asatryan, Controversies in Formative Shi i
Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and Their Beliefs (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).
54. Hodgson, “ Abd Allāh ibn Saba’,” 51; see Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 157–158.
55. Al- asan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-shī a, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul,
1931), 19–22.
56. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 3.
57. For a survey of al-Tamīmī’s place in the Islamic literary tradition, see Anthony, The
Caliph and the Heretic, 9–18.
58. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 3164; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol. 16: The
Community Divided, trans. Adrian Brockett (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1985), 104–105.
59. See, for example, Abū ātim al-Rāzī, Zina, in Abd Allāh Sallūm al-Sāmarrā’ī, Al-ghulūw
wa-l-firaq al-ghāliya fī l- a āra al-islāmiyya (Baghdad, 1972), 304–307; Shahrastānī,
Milal 1: 204–205.
60. Sayf ibn Umar al-Tamīmī, Kitāb al-ridda wa-l-futu wa-K. al-jamal wa-masīr A isha
wa- Alī: A Critical Edition of the Fragments Preserved in the University Library of
Imām Muhammad ibn Sa ud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ed. Qasim
al-Sammarrai, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1, 122. Quoted in Anthony, The Caliph and
the Heretic, 23.
61. Quoted in Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 77.
62. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 78–80.
63. Abū Amr Mu ammad ibn Umar ibn Abd al- Azīz al-Kishshī, Rijāl al-Kishshī (published
as Mu ammad ibn asan al- usī, Ikhtiyār ma rifat al-rijāl), ed. asan Mo tafavī
(Mashhad, 1970), 106–107. Quoted in Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic, 163.
64. Though, according to Uri Rubin, and without any proof, Abdullāh b. Salām seems to
have been closer to a anīf than a Jew. See Rubin, “ anīfiyya and Ka ba,” 109.
65. Michael Lecker, “Muhammad at Medina: A Geographical Approach,” JSAI 6
(1985): 29–63, at 37–38.
66. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 3017 (Humphreys, The Crisis of the Early Caliphate, 215).
 Notes 219

67. al-Māliqī, Al-tamhīd wa’l-bayān fī maqtal al-shahīd Uthmān, ed. Ma mūd Yūsuf
Zāyed (Beirut, 1964), 136.
68. Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet, 3–4.
69. Tayeb El-Hibri, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), 14.
70. Umar b. Shabba, Ta rīkh al-madīna al-munawwara (Akhbār al-madīna al-
nabawiyya), ed. Ali Mu ammad Dandal, 2 vols. (Beirut, 1996), 2: 225–226.
71. Requisite secondary literature may be found in Bernard Chapira, “Légendes
bibliques attribuées à Ka b el-Ahbar,” REJ 69 (1919): 86–107; Israel
Wolfensohn, Ka b al-A bār und seine Stellung im adith und in der islamischen
Legendenliteratur (Gelnhausen: Kalbfleish, 1933); Moshe Perlmann, “A
Legendary Story of Ka b al-Ahbār’s Conversion to Islam,” Jewish Social Studies
5 (1953): 85–99. More generally on the topic of conversion, see Roberto
Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’ān and Muslim Literature (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), 86–96.
72. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2514; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol.
13: The Conquest of Iraq, Southwestern Persia, and Egypt, trans. G. H. A. Juynboll
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 94–95.
73. See Ibn Sa d’s Kitab al-tabaqat al-kabir; English translation in The Men of Madina,
trans. Aisha Bewley (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1997), 1: 277.
74. M. Schmitz, “Ka b al-A bār,” EI2 4: 316–317.
75. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 173.
76. M. Schmitz, “Ka b al-A bār,” 316.
77. See Ibn Sa d’s Kitab at- abaqat al-kabir (English translation: Bewley, The Men of
Madina, 1: 68).
78. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2514 (English translation: Juynboll, The Conquest of Iraq,
Southwestern Persia, and Egypt, 95).
79. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2409; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol. 12: The
Battle of al-Qādsiyyah and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine, trans. Y. Friedmann
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 196.
80. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2408 (English translation: Friedmann, The Battle of al-Qādsiyyah
and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine, 195).
81. al- abarī, Tārīkh, 1: 2947 (English translation: Humphreys, The Crisis of the Early
Caliphate, 151).
82. El-Hibri, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History, 15–16.
83. Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Islamicate History of Religions?,” HR 27 (1988): 405–411;
and subsequently Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 136–164.
84. One important exception is the work of al-Shahrastānī (553/1158), who is more inter-
ested in understanding and classification than he is in commentary.
85. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 154.
86. These are certainly not the only ones. Other important heresiologists who dealt with
Jews and Judaism include Ibn Rabban (d. 251/865), Ibn Qutaybah (d. 276/889), al-
Ya qūbī (d. 292/905), and al-Mas ūdī (d. 345/956).
220 Notes

87. For general background, see Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew
Bible, 23–69.
88. Abu Mu ammad Alī ibn A mad ibn azm, Kitāb al-fi al fī l-milal wa-l-ahwā wa-l-
ni al, 5 vols. in 3 (Beirut: Dār al-Ma rifa li l- ibā a wa l-Nashr, 1975).
89. Abu al-Fat Mu ammad ibn Abd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī, Kitab al-Milal wa al-
Nihal, eds. Amir Ali Mahna and Ali asan Fā ūr (Beirut: Dār al-Ma rifah, 1993),
90. Here I follow Henri Laoust, who argues that, in many ways, all medieval Muslim
thinkers are to some extent engaged in the writing of heresiology. See his
“L’hérésiographie musulmane sous les Abbassides,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiéval
19 (1967): 157–178, at 157.
91. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 147.
92. Ibn azm, Kitāb al-fi al, 1: 207–208. The translation comes from Adang, Muslim
Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, 247.
93. Ibn azm, Kitāb al-fi al, 1: 207.
94. Al-Shahrastānī, Kitāb al-milal, 1: 253.
95. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb al-īmān, trans. Salman Hassan al-Ani and Shadia Ahmad Tel
(Kuala Lampur: Islamic Book Trust, 2009), 2.
96. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb al-īmān, 153.
97. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Fatāwā l-kubrā (Beirut, n.d.), 1: 369 (no. 2241). See Kister, “Do Not
Assimilate . . .,” 350.
98. Beeston, “Himyarite Monotheism,” 149–151.

Chapter 5

1. Q 5/82.
2. al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmi al-kabīr, 3: 224 (no. 1565).
3. al-Jā i , Kitāb fī l-Radd alā ‘l-na ārā, trans. J. Finkel, “A Risala of al-Jahiz,” JAOS 47
(1927): 311–334, at 324.
4. I certainly have no intention of saying that they did, only that it was theologically
necessary to do so. Relevant secondary literature includes Wayne A. Meeks, The First
Urban Christian: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003). See also Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian
Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). I have no intention of
wading into the debates prominent in this field. However, I have found the essays
collected in the following volume to be helpful: The Ways That Never Parted: Jews
and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds. Adam H. Becker and
Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).
5. See McAuliffe, Qur anic Christians, 168–170.
6. For a wonderful overview of this literature, see Thomas F. Michel, “A Muslim
Theologian’s Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawab al-sahih” (PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 1978).
 Notes 221

7. Abd al-Jabbār, Critique of Christian Origins: A Parallel English-Arabic Text, ed. and
trans. Gabriel Said Reynolds and Samir Khalil Samir (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 2010).
8. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al- a ī li-man baddala din al-masi ; English translation in
A Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawab al-sahih, ed.
and trans. Thomas F. Michel (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1984).
9. See the remarks in Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, 14–19.
10. McAuliffe, Qur anic Christians, 258–259.
11. On the role of Jesus in the Qur ān more generally, see Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in
the Qur ān; Todd Lawson, The Crucifixion and the Qur an: A Study in the History of
Muslim Thought (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009); Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings
and Stories in Islamic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur ān and the Bible.
12. Most recently, see Hoyland, In God’s Path, 138–145. On Eastern Christians’ responses
to these successes, see Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 23–44.
Relevant sources may be found in Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims; Penn,
Envisioning Islam, 15–52.
13. For such critiques and other relatively contemporaneous accounts, especially among
Eastern Christians, see The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, trans. R. W. Thomson,
historical commentary by J. Howard-Johnston, and assistance from T. Greenwood,
2 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Marionite Chronicle, in The
Seventh-Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles. eds. A. Palmer et al. (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1993), 29–35; The Chronicle of Zuqnin Parts III and IV A.D. 488–775,
trans. Amir Harrak (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999). For ge-
neral context, see Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It.
14. See the useful comments in Wood, “Introduction,” xiii.
15. Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 5.
16. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Late Antiquity, 4.
17. Thomas Sizgorich, “‘Become Infidels or We Will Throw You into the Fire’: The
Martyrs of Najran in Early Muslim Historiography and Qur’anic Exegesis,” in Writing
True Stories: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Early Medieval
Near East, eds. Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 125–147, at 146.
18. Wood, “Introduction,” xiii.
19. See, for example, Harry Munt, “The Prophet’s City Before the Prophet: Ibn Zabāla
(d. after 199/814) on Pre-Islamic Medina,” in History and Identity in the Late Antique
Near East, ed. P. Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–121.
20. Classic and useful works remain René Dussaud, La pénétration des Arabes en
Syrie avant l’Islam (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1955); Tor Andrae, Les origins de l’Islam
et le christianisme (Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1955), 15–38; J. S. Trimingham,
Christianity Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (London: Longman, 1979); S. B.
Ayib, Al-Masī iyya al- arabiyya wa-ta awwurhā (Beirut, 1997).
222 Notes

21. Arthur Jeffrey, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur ān (Baroda: Oriental Institute,
1938), 20–21.
22. A. Abd al-Ghani, Tārīkh al- īra fī l-jāhiliyya wa- l-islām (Damascus: Dār Kanān,
1993), 471–495. See further M. J. Kister, “Al- īra: Some Notes on Its Relation with
Arabia,” Arabica 15 (1969); 143–169. More recently, see Philip Wood, “Al- īra and Its
Histories,” JAOS 136.4 (2016): 785–799.
23. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 11–15.
24. Recent egregious examples of this may be found in Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic
Reading of the Koran; Günter Lüling, A Challenge to Islam for Reformation: The
Rediscovery and Reliable Reconstruction of a Comprehensive Pre-Islamic Christian
Hymnal Hidden in the Koran Under Earliest Islamic Reinterpretations (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 2003). For context, see Gilliot, “Christians and Christianity in Islamic
Exegesis,” 31–56.
25. See some of the literature discussed in my “Religion Without Religion,” 867–888.
26. Al- abarī, Tafsīr to Q 57/27, eds. A mad Sa īd Alī, et al. (Cairo: Mu afā al-Bābī al-
alabī, 1954–1968).
27. Gilliot, “Christians and Christianity in Islamic Exegesis,” 36–37.
28. Sayf ibn Umar, Kitāb al-ridda wa-l-futu , ed. Q. al-Sāmarrā’ī (Leiden: Brill, 1995),
132–135. See further Pieter Sjoerdvan Koningsveld, “The Islamic Image of Paul and
the Origin of the Gospel of Barnabas,” JSAI 20 (1996): 200–228; Gilliot, “Christians
and Christianity in Islamic Exegesis,” 40–48.
29. Al- abarī, Tafsīr, 6: 439. See Mahmoud M. Ayoub, The Qur an and Its Interpreters
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 2: 149.
30. See chapter 2.
31. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 351–352.
32. Ibn Abī Shayba, Mu annaf, 11: 277 (no. 33237).
33. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 367.
34. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 363.
35. R. Stephen Humphreys, Mu awiya Abi Sufyan: From Arabia to Empire
(Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 84. According to Clive Foss, an official Greek inscription
at Hammat Gader, rebuilt under Mu āwiya in 662, is preceded by a cross and contains
Mu āwiya’s name. See Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coins: An Introduction, with a Catalogue of
the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 118.
36. Al-Khallāl, Ahl al-milal, 2: 120. Though on Ibn anbal and community forma-
tion, see Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion
in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008),
231–270.
37. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 353–399.
38. Abū Dawūd, Sunan, eds. Sh. Al-Arna ū and M. Kāmil Qarah Balilī (Damascus,
2009), 6: 144 (no. 4031).
39. Hoyland, In God’s Path, 138–145. See further Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests,
91–150; Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed
the World We Live In (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2012), 34–65.
 Notes 223

40. See the excellent survey in Crone, “The Early Islamic World,” 309–332, at 311–318.
41. Greg Fisher, for example, argues that this would have stemmed from the courts of the
Nasrid and Jafnid kings having already played a role in sponsoring or disseminating
Arabic poetry or using Arabic as a monumental script to rival Greek or Syriac. See his
“Kingdoms or Dynasties?: Arabs, History, and Identity Before Islam,” Journal of Late
Antiquity 4.2 (2011): 245–267. The point is made even more explicit in the draft of a
forthcoming article by him and Philip Wood.
42. See the classic study in Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic
Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 49–59.
43. Crone, Slaves on Horses, 42–45.
44. See Wood, “Paradigms of Religion and the Swift Birth of Islam: Wilfred Cantwell
Smith Revisited,” 159–162.
45. Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, 84.
46. Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, 84–93. As Millar rightly notes, this is not to diminish
the role of Greek, but only to note that Latin was the imperial language.
47. See, for example, Fowden, Before and After Muhammad, 49–67. In the larger context
of Iraq, see Phillip Wood, The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in
Late Antique Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–29.
48. The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitution: A Translation
with Commentary, Glossary, and Bibliography, eds. Clyde Pharr, Theresa Sherrer
Davidson, and Mary Brown Pharr (Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2001), XVI.1.2:
440. Hereafter abbreviated as CTh. Relevant context may be found in R. Malcolm
Errington, Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina University Press, 2006).
49. CTh XVI.1.3: 440.
50. For example, CTh XVI.2.8–13: 441–442.
51. CTh XVI.4.2: 449.
52. CTh XVI.5.3: 450.
53. CTh XVI.10.25: 476.
54. Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, 122–123. See further Millar, Religion, Language, and
Community in the Roman Near East, 54–64.
55. Though on the conflation of “Jew” and “Pagan” in certain orthodox genealogies of
error, see Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics—A Category Error,” in The Ways That
Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds.
Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 345–360.
56. For example, CTh XVI.8.21: 469. See, in this regard, Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the
Early Islamic Empire, 115–119.
57. Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, 126.
58. CTh XVI.8.3: 467.
59. CTh XVI.8.11: 468.
60. CTh XVI.8.21: 470. C.f., CTh XVI.8.18: 469.
61. CTh XVI.8.16: 469.
62. CTh XVI.8.13: 468.
224 Notes

63. On the repercussions for and within Judaism, see Hayim Lapin, “The Law of Moses
and the Jews: Rabbis, Ethnic Marking, and Romanization,” in Jews, Christians, and the
Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, eds. Natalie B. Dohrmann and
Annette Yoshiko Reed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 79–90.
64. Here the comments of Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed are helpful. See their
“Introduction: Traditional Models and New Directions,” in The Ways That Never
Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds. Adam H.
Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 1–34.
65. According to Levy-Rubin, the shurū Umar did not emerge ex nihilo but would have
“stemmed from the ancient societies of the conquered peoples, including Hellenistic-
Roman-Byzantine culture, and Iranian society and culture.” See her Non-Muslims in
the Early Islamic Empire, 4.
66. See the literature surveyed in chapter 2.
67. Michael Morony, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest, 2nd ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2005), 277. See further the classic work of Peter Brown, The Making of Late
Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971).
68. Classic works on Arabic and Islamic polemical literature about Jews and Muslims
remain Moritz Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer
Sprache (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1877); Ignaz Goldziher, “Uber muhammedanische
Polemik gegen Ahl al-Kitab,” ZDMG 32 (1878): 341–387.
69. Abd al-Jabbār, Tathbīt dala īl al-nubuwwa, ed. Abd al-Karīm Uthmān, 2 vols.
(Beirut: Dār al- Arabiyya, 1966), 2: 156.
70. Ibn azm, Kitāb al-fi al fī al-milal wa l-ahwā wa l-ni al, 5 vols. (Baghdād: Maktabat
al-Muthannā, n.d.), 1: 56.
71. Michel, “Ibn Taymiyya’s ‘Al-Jawab al-Sahih,’ ” 84.
72. Al-Jā i , Fī l-radd alā al-nasārā, in Rasa īl Jā i , ed. Abd al-Salam Muhammad
Hārūn (Beirut, 1991), 3: 305; English translation in Finkel, “A Risala of al-Jahiz,” JAOS
47 (1927): 311–334, at 324.
73. Al-Jā i , Fī l-radd alā al-nasārā, 3: 311 (Finkel, “A Risala of al-Jahiz,” 333).
74. An excellent contextualization of the work may be found in Michel, “A Muslim
Theologian’s Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawab al-sahih.”
75. For background, see M. Horton, “Paulus, Bischof von Sidon: Einige seiner
philosophischen Abhandlung,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 19 (1906): 144–166;
Louis Buffat, “Lettre de Paul, Evêque de Saida,” Revue de l’Orient Chrètien 8
(1903): 388–425.
76. For example, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al- a ī li-man baddala dīn al-masī , 4 vols.
(Cairo: Al-Ma ba a al-Madaniyya, 1382/1964), 1: 327–328.
77. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al- a ī , 1: 19.
78. Al-Jawāb al- a ī is but one of several works Ibn Taymiyya wrote on Christianity. See
Carl Brockelmann, GAL (Leiden: Brill, 1938), Supp. 2: 123.71. For relevant context,
see Michel, “A Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity,” 233–241.
79. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al- a ī , 1: 113–114.
80. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Jawāb al- a ī , 2: 230. The translation is found in Michel, “A
Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity,” 566–567.
 Notes 225

81. See, for example, al-Kindī (d. 255/870), Al-Radd alā al-na ārā, included in Ya yā
ibn Adī, Maqāla Yatabayyan fīhī Ghala Abī Yūsuf, ed. A. Périer, in Petits traités
apologetiques de Ya yā ibn Adī (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1920), 118–119.
82. Again, Ibn Taymiyya is not unique in this regard. I mentioned Abd al-Jabbār earlier in
this chapter. See further Samuel M. Stern, “ Abd al-Jabbār’s Account of How Christ’s
Religion Was Falsified by the Adoption of Roman Customs,” JTS 19 (1968): 128–185,
at 174–175.

Chapter 6

1. A mad ibn Muhammad ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 1: 334. Quoted in Steven
M. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 100–101.
2. Israel Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presentation of Ibn
azm,” JAOS 28 (1907): 1–80, at 1.
3. Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 2. In this regard see also Najam
Haider, The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). His important study, in his own
words, seeks to “directly [contest] widespread assumptions about the categorical un-
reliability and thoroughly hagiographic nature of Shī ī (and other non-Sunnī) his-
torical writing. It does so by demonstrating that Shī ī historians adhered to the same
general rules of historical writing that governed non-Shī ī sources” (25). Yet, for some
reason, it is precisely these Shī ī sources that are assumed to be problematic, whereas
Sunnī ones are not and, even more problematic, simply taken for granted as providing
“factual” reconstructions.
4. This mistake—or perhaps better, confusion—is certainly not confined to early
Islam. I would argue that we also see it, for example, in the Rezeptionsgeschichte of
Said’s Orientalism. What is clearly a literary argument has been transformed into
a historiographic one. For informed criticism of Said, see, for example, Suzanne L.
Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); George Steinmetz, The Devil’s
Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa and
Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For a criticism from
a different perspective, see Hallaq, Restating Orientalism. I try to contextualize
some of these debates in my Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into
Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception (Sheffield: Equinox, 2015).
5. Unfortunately, the overwhelming tendency in many circles within Islamic studies
is simply to reproduce the accounts in later polemical sources as if they were his-
torical transcripts of events that transpired. One of the most egregious examples
of this in recent years is Asma Asfaruddin, The First Muslims: History and Memory
(Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). For a scathing review, see Chase F. Robinson, “The
Ideological Uses of Early Islam,” Past and Present 203 (May 2009): 205–228.
226 Notes

6. Haider, The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam, 1–25.

7. Perhaps laid out most conveniently in the Sīra literature described in previous
chapters. This, in turn, functions as the blueprint for more “historical” studies. It is per-
haps best presented for an English-speaking audience in the work of W. Montgomery
Watt. See in particular his Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina—though
it is certainly worth noting that Watt maintained that the legendary aspects found in
the Sīra are but motivational accounts of Muhammad’s actions, but that we should as-
sume the basic framework is largely true. Within this context, it is worth mentioning
that other scholars contend that the Islamic traditions about Muhammad’s life and
times are nothing more than literary products by subsequent generations and not ex-
pressly historical documents about the life of a, let alone the, historical Muhammad.
See, in particular, Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder.
8. See, for example, the sources cited in Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to
Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 141–309.
9. Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays, ed. An ārī Zanjānī Khū īnī (Qom: n.p., 1415/1995), 2: 585–
586. Quoted in Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur an and the Speaking
Qur an: Scriptural Sources of Islam Between History and Fervor, with contributions
by Etan Kohlberg and Hasan Ansari, trans. Eric Ormsby (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), 30.
10. This is certainly not the place to provide an analysis of Karbalā among the Shī a.
For good attempts that do this, see Michael Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); David Pinault, “Shia
Lamentation Rituals and Reinterpretations of the Doctrine of Intercession: Two
Cases from Modern India,” History of Religions 38.3 (1999): 285–305; Pinault, Horse
of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Kamran
Scot Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Israr Ahmad, The Tragedy of Karbala,
trans. Muhammad Tufail (Lahore: Markazi Anjuman Khuddam-ul-Qur an, 2003);
and Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi i Lebanon
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)
11. K. Sulaym b. Qays, 2: 574 (Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur an and the Speaking
Qur an, 25).
12. Such election, however, does not have to involve the entire population. Such election
tended to be done by “the People Who Loose and Bind” (ahl al- all wa l- aqd), which
could be an ad hoc council of notables or even just the caliph designating his suc-
cessor. See March, The Caliphate of Man, 12–14.
13. Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur an and the Speaking Qur an, 6.
14. Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur an and the Speaking Qur an, 6–7.
15. Sunan Abī Dāwūd, no. 4597, c.f. Jāmi al-Tirmidhī, no. 2640. Also included is the idea
that Judaism is split into seventy-one sects, and Christianity into seventy-two.
16. As Goldziher showed close to 150 years ago, there also existed the complete opposite
tradition, to wit, that only one sect will be doomed, and the other seventy-two will
attain paradise. See his “Beiträge zur Litteraturgeschichte der Schia,” Sitzungsberichte
 Notes 227

der philos.-histor. Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien 78

(1874): 439–524, at 445.
17. English translation: Moslem Schism and Sects (al-Farq bain al-Firaq): Being the History
of the Various Islamic Philosophic Systems Developed in Islam by Abū Man ūr al-
Kāhir ibn āhir al Baghdādī, part 2, trans. Abraham S. Halkin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1935).
18. Al-Baghdādī, Moslem Schism and Sects, 169.
19. Al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-khi a al-maqrīziyyah (Cairo: al-Nīl, 1908), 2: 344.
20. Requisite biography and references may be found in José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, “Abū
Mu ammad Alī Ibn azm: A Biographical Sketch,” in Ibn azm of Cordoba: The Life
and Works of a Controversial Thinker, eds. Camilla Adang, Maribel Fierro, and Sabine
Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 3–24.
21. More generally, see Robert Gleave, Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning and
Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012),
1–25. More specifically in terms of Ibn azm’s literalism, see Adam Sabra, “Ibn
azm’s Literalism: A Critique of Islamic Legal Theory,” in Ibn azm of Cordoba: The
Life and Works of a Controversial Thinker, 97–160.
22. See, for example, Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi
in Twelver Shi ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 1–38. For a
primer to Shī ī thought more generally including its distinctive features, see Moojan
Momen, An Introduction to Shi i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi ism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
23. Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presentation of Ibn azm,” 1.
24. Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shiites,” 2.
25. Ibn azm, Kitāb al-fi al fī l-milal wa l-ahwā wa l-ni al, ed. A mad Shamseddin
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al- Ilmiyya, 2007), 1: 368.
26. In brief: theologians who argued for the importance of reason in understanding the
traditions. They also stressed a nonliteral reading of the Qur ān, especially when it
came to understanding God’s attributes. See, for example, Josef van Ess, The Flowering
of Muslim Theology, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006); J. R. T. M. Peters, God’s Created Speech: A Study in the Speculative
Theology of the Mu tazilī Qā ī l-Qu āt Abū al- asan Abd al-Jabbār ibn A mad al-
Hamadānī (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
27. In brief: They maintained that only God could decide whether or not a Muslim had
lost their faith, and consequently Muslims should practice postponement ( irjā ) of
judgment on committers of serious sins. See, for example, Wilferd Madelung, “Early
Sunnī Doctrine Concerning Faith as Reflected in the Kitāb al-Imān of Abū Ubayd
al-Qāsim b. Sallām,” SI 32 (1970): 233–254; J. Meric Pessagno, “The Murji a, Īmān and
Abū Ubayd,” JAOS 95.3 (1975): 382–394.
28. In brief: a party in the first centuries of Islam that argued, in opposition to the Murji a,
that Muslims who commit grave sins cease to be Muslims. See Patricia Crone,
God’s Rule: Government and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006);
Jeffrey T. Kenney, Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
228 Notes

29. For example, Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 368.

30. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 371.
31. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 370.
32. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 372.
33. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 373.
34. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 373.
35. Ibn azm, Kitab al-fisal, 1: 373.
36. Wasserstrom, for example, calls him an early example of a “historian of reli-
gion.” See his Between Muslim and Jew, 155. See further his “Islamicate History of
Religions?,” 405–411. Here he follows the lead of Louis Massignon, “Language,” in
Mid-East World-Center: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen
(New York: Harper, 1956), 235–251, at 251. In addition, Eric J. Sharpe refers to
him as “writing the first history of religion in world literature.” See his Comparative
Religion: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975), 11. More recently, see Muhammad
Azizan Sabjan, “Early Muslim Scholarship in Religionwissenchaft: A Study of
Muhammad ‘Abd Al-Karīm Al-Shahrastānī’s On the Concept of the People of a
Dubious Book (Ahl Shubhat Kitāb),” Journal of Religious and Theological Information
12.3–4 (2015): 79–85.
37. Al-Shahrastānī, K. al-milal wa l-ni al, ed. A. Muhammad al-Wakīl (Cairo,
1968), 1: 14.
38. See Keith Lewinstein, “The Azāriqa in Islamic Heresiography,” BSOAS 54 (1991),
251–268, at 251–252. See also the remarks in Adam R. Gaiser, “Satan’s Seven Specious
Arguments: al-Shahrastānī’s Kitāb al-Milal wa-l- Ni al in an Isma ili Context,” JIS
19.2 (2008): 178–195, at 180–185.
39. Al-Shahrastānī, K. al-milal wa l-ni al, 1: 19.
40. On Shahrastānī’s relationship to Nizarī Ismā īlism, see Gaiser, “Satan’s Seven Specious
Arguments,” 180–185. See further Diane Steigerwald, “The Divine Word (Kalima) in
Shahrastānī’s Majlis,” SR 25.3 (1996): 335–352.
41. This is certainly not to imply that Ismā īlī or Shī ī thinkers did not engage in their own
form of heresiography. When they did, however, they—not surprisingly—used their
own traditions as normative. See, for example, the heresiographcial portions of Abū
ātim al-Rāzī’s (d. 322/935) Kitāb al-zīna; Abū Tammām’s (fourth/tenth century)
Bāb al-shay ān in his Kitāb al-shajara, found in An Ismaili Heresiography: The “Bāb
al-Shay ān,” from Abū Tammām, Kitāb al-shajara, eds. and trans. Wilferd Madelung
and Paul Walker (Leiden: Brill, 1998). See also al- illī’s (d. 726/1325) Kitāb minhāj
al-karāma fī ma rifa al-imāma. .
42. Al-Shahrastānī, K. al-milal wa l-ni al, 1: 146.
43. Al-Shahrastānī, K. al-milal wa l-ni al, 1: 169.
44. Al-Shahrastānī, K. al-milal wa l-ni al, 1: 172.
45. See, for example, the criticisms found in Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery
Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 1–35. See further my Comparison: A
Critical Primer (Sheffield: Equinox, 2017), 25–50.
 Notes 229

46. See the comments in Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed, “Ibn Taymiyya and His
Times,” in Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, eds. Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–20.
47. It is for this reason, moreover, that Ibn Taymiyya is often held up as the “grandfather”
of contemporary Islamist groups. See Rapoport and Ahmed, “Ibn Taymiyya and His
Times,” 3–5.
48. Henri Laoust, “La Critique du Sunnisme dans la doctrine d’Al- illī,” REI 34
(1966): 35–60
49. Henri Laoust, for example, calls it “l’une des contributions les plus imposantes à la
littérature sunnite de polémique anti-shī ite.” See his Essai sur les doctrines sociales et
politiques de Taqī-d-Dīn A mad b. Taymīya, canoniste anbalite né à arran en 661/
1262, mort à Damas en 728/1328 (Cairo: I.F.A.O., 1939), 97. See further Jon Hoover,
Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 10–14.
50. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya fī naq kalām al-shī a al-qadariyya, ed.
Muhammad Rashād Sālim, 9 vols. (Riyadh: Jāmi at al-Imām Muhammad b. Su ūd al-
Islāmiyya, 1406/1986), 4: 86.
51. See the comments in Yahya M. Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya’s Critique of Shī ī
Imāmology: Translation of Three Sections of the Minhāj al-Sunna,” MW 104.1–2
(2014): 109–149, at 112–113.
52. See Tariq al-Jamil, “Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Mu ahhar al- illī: Shi i Polemics and
the Struggle for Religious Authority in Medieval Islam,” in Ibn Taymiyya and His
Times, eds. Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 229–246.
53. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 4: 87. See further the remarks in his student Ibn
Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s (d. 750/1350) Ighathat al-lahfan min masayid al-shaytan, ed
Abu Abd Allāh Mu ammad ibn Abī Bakr al-shahīr, 2 vols. (Cairo: al- alabī, 1939),
1: 54. For relevant context, see Marco Demichelis, “The Fate of Others in Fourteenth-
Century anbalism: Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328/728) – Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d.
1350/750) and the Fanā’ an-Nār,” Annali di Scienza religiosa 9 (2016): 271–294.
54. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 4: 87.
55. al-Jamil, “Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Mu ahhar al- illī,” 236.
56. Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya’s Critique of Shī ī Imāmology,” 113.
57. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 4: 88–89. See also Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Ighathat
al-lahfan min masayid al-shaytan, 1: 82; and Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa l-nihaya, 2nd
ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al- Ilmiyya, 2003).
58. More generally see Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī Shī ī Views on the a āba,” JSAI 5
(1984): 143–175.
59. See Aaron M. Hagler, “Sapping the Narrative: Ibn Kathir’s Account of the Shūrā of
Uthmān in Kitab al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya,” IJMES 47 (2015): 303–321.
60. See, for example, Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 2: 409.12–14; Ibn Taymiyya,
Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 22–34; Ibn al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-maw ū āt, ed. Abd al-Ra mān
Muhammad Uthmān, 3 vols. (Medina, n.p., 1966), 1: 338.
61. Ibn Abd Rabbih, Al- Iqd al-farīd, 1: 334–335.
230 Notes

62. Steven M. Wasserstrom, “The Shī īs Are the Jews of Our Community: An
Interreligious Comparison Within Sunnī Thought,” IOS 14 (1994): 297–324, at 306.
See further Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī Shī ī Views on the a āba,” 143–145.
63. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 23.
64. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 29.
65. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 97–98.
66. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 24.
67. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhā al-sunna, 1: 23.
68. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 23.
69. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 24.
70. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 25.
71. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” in his Map Is Not
Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), 240–264, at 246.

Chapter 7

1. Bukhārī, Khalq af āl al- ibād, 119.

2. This is certainly not the place to discuss the formation of the legal schools, only to
note that they were, like so much in this period, under construction. For rele-
vant background, see Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools
of Law, 9th–10th Centuries C.E. (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 1–31; Norman Calder,
Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
223–243; Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 11–20; Joseph E.
Lowry, Early Islamic Legal Theory: The “Risala” of Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi i
(Leiden: Brill, 2007), 23–59; Wael Hallaq, Authority, Continuity, and Change in Islamic
Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–10.
3. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1: 315–409, esp. 385–392.
4. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1: 386.
5. Christopher Melchert, “The Piety of the Hadith Folk,” IJMES 34.3 (2002): 425–439,
at 427.
6. Melchert, “The Piety of the Hadith Folk,” 429.
7. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam, 27. See further Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of
Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawāndī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Their Impact on Islamic
Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 3–6; see also Abd al-Ra mān Badawī, The History of
Unbelief in Islam (Beirut), 27–34.
8. Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine
Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, Berlin
1991–1997), 1: 416.
9. Melhem Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire
(Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1993), 12.
10. al-Tirmidhi, al-Sunan, ed. A. M. Shakir (Cairo, 1962), 4: 59.
 Notes 231

11. Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First
Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4–23. Indeed,
Hines subsequently argues that it was the mi na, or inquisition of Al-Ma mūn (d.
218/833), that succeeded in putting an end to this conception of the caliphate. See his
“mi na,” EI2 7: 2–6.
12. François de Blois, “Zindī ,” EI2 11: 510–103, at 510
13. de Blois, “Zindī ,” 510. See also Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle
de l’hegire, 43–45; J. Josephson, “The Hellenistic Heritage of the zanādiqa,” in Current
Issues in the Analysis of Semitic Grammar and Lexicon II: Oslo–Göteborg Cooperation
4th–5th November 2005, eds. L. Edzard and J. Retsö (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des
Morgenlandes 59; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 175–194, at 175–178.
14. Sarah Stroumsa and Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Aspects of Anti-Manichaean Polemics
in Late Antiquity and under Early Islam,” HTR 81.1 (1988): 37–58, at 38; see also
Georges Vajda, “Les zindîqs en pays d’Islam au debut de la période abbaside,” RSO 17
(1937–1939), 173–229, at 179–182.
15. Stroumsa and Stroumsa, “Aspects of Anti-Manichaean Polemics in Late Antiquity
and Under Early Islam,” 39, 56–57; Francesco Gabrieli, “La «Zandaqa» au Ier siècle
abbaside,” in L’Élaboration de l’islam: colloque de Strasbourg (12–13 juin 1959)
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 23–38, at 23–25.
16. Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A
Historical Survey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 82–83.
17. See Stroumsa and Stroumsa, “Aspects of Anti-Manichaean Polemics in Late Antiquity
and under Early Islam,” 39.
18. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, ed. Gustav Flügel, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Verlag von F. C.
Vogel, 1872), 2: 328; English translation in The Fihrist, trans. Bayard Dodge, 2 vols.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2, 776.
19. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 61–62; see also
Stroumsa and Stroumsa, “Aspects of Anti-Manichaean Polemics in Late Antiquity
and under Early Islam,” 39.
20. de Blois, “Zindī ,” 510.
21. See, for example, Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 62;
see further Johann Fück, “Spuren des Zindīqtums in der islamischen Tradition,” in
Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des nahen und fernen Ostens: Paul Kahle zum 60
Geburtstag, eds. W. Heffening and W. Kirfel (Leiden: Brill, 1935), 95–100.
22. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 14
23. See, for example, Abd al-Jabbār, Fadl al-i tizāl wa- abaqāt al-mu tazila, ed. Fu ād Sayyid
(Tunis, 1974; repr. Beirut, 2017), 165: 11–13. On Wā il b. Atā , more generally, see Sarah
Stroumsa, “The Origins of the Mu tazila Reconsidered,” JSAI 13 (1990): 265–293.
24. H. S. Nyberg, “Zum Kampf zwischen Islam und Manichäismus,” OLZ 32 (1929): 427–
448, at 430–431; see also Vajda, “Les Zindīqs en Pays d’Islam au Debut de la Période
Abbaside,” 173.
25. Patricia Crone, “Ungodly Cosmologies,” in Islam, the Ancient Near East, and Varieties
of Godlessness, vol. 3 of Collected Studies in Three Volumes, eds. Hanna Siurua and
Patricia Crone (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 118–150.
232 Notes

26. Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, 6. See further Josef von Ess, “Skepticism in
Islamic Religious Thought,” Al-Abhath 21 (1968): 1–14.
27. Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, 40–46.
28. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 320 (English: 2: 751).
29. al-Bīrūnī, al‐Āthār al‐bāqiyya min al‐qurūn al‐khāliya (The Chronology of Ancient
Nations), trans. Edward Sachau (London: Minerva GMBH, 1879), 209.
30. For example, Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 327–338 (English: 2: 773–806).
31. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 331 (English: 2: 784).
32. al-Mas ūdi, Murūj al-dhahab, ed. C. Pellat, 7 vols. (Beirut: al-Jāmi a al-Lubnāniyya,
1966–1979), 5: 84; see further Al- abarī, Tārīkh, 3: 422.
33. See the comments in Crone, “Ungodly Cosmologies,” 199–120.
34. For a general overview of the contours of some of these Christian groups, see the dis-
cussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths
We Never Knew (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 95–112.
35. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 332 (English: 2: 788).
36. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 333 (English: 2: 790).
37. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 335 (English: 2: 794).
38. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 337 (English: 2: 803).
39. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 338 (English: 2: 804).
40. See, for example, Christopher Melchert, “The Early History of Islamic Law,” in Method
and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. H. Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 293–324,
at 310.
41. Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 386–392. See further the discussion in Christopher
Melchert, “The Piety of the Hadith Folk,” 425–439. The term “ adīth folk” has
the distinct advantage of avoiding the idea that they were somehow older or
more authoritative than their adversaries, especially the rationalist theologians
(mutakallimūn).
42. On the general fear of their infiltration, see al-Sharīf al-Murta ā, Ghurar al-fawā id
wa-durar al-qalā id, ed. Muhammad Abu al-Fa l Ibrāhīm, 2 vols. (Cairo: Dār I yā
al-Kutub al- Arabiyya, 1954 [1373]), 1: 127.
43. See the important study of István Kristó-Nagy, La pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffa : Un «
agent double » dans le monde persan et arabe (Versailles: Éditions de Paris, 2013).
44. On Abd al-Karīm b. Abī al- Awjā , see al-Bīrūnī, āthār, 67–68; al-Baghdādī, al-Farq
bayn al-firaq, ed. Muhammad Badr (Cairo: Ma ba at al-Ma ārif, 1910 [1328]), 167–
168. More generally see Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire,
131–140. See further Stroumsa and Stroumsa, “Aspects of Anti-Manichaean Polemics
in Late Antiquity and under Early Islam,” 55–57.
45. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 131–133. See further
Nimrod Hurvitz, The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power (New York: Routledge,
2002), 115–144.
46. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 153–170.
47. For example, “Say, ‘If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like
of this Qur ān, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other
assistants’ ” (Q 17/88; c.f. 52/30–34).
 Notes 233

48. Indeed, it is a charge that would continue to be leveled against critics. Maribel Fierro,
for example, has shown how Ibn azm charged an unknown Jew, believed to be
Ismā īl ibn Naghrīla, with being a zindīq for trying to imitate the Qur ān. See her
“Ibn azm and the Jewish Zindīq,” in Ibn azm of Cordoba: The Life and Works of
a Controversial Thinker, eds. Camilla Adang, Maribel Fierro, and Sabine Schmidtke
(Leiden: Brill, 2012), 497–509.
49. See Vajda, “Les zindîqs en pays d’Islam au debut de la période abbaside,” 181–183;
Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 189–196; Kristó-Nagy,
La pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffa , 49–62.
50. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 166–170.
51. See the comments in Said Amir Arjomand, “ Abd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffa and the
Abbasid Revolution,” IS 27.1–4 (1994): 9–36, at 20–21.
52. Arjomand, “ Abd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffa and the Abbasid Revolution,” 20.
53. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 175–186.
54. See van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 2: 29, 34–36. See further Josef van Ess, “Some
Fragments of the Mu aradat al-Qur an Attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa ,” in Studia
Arabica & Islamica: Festschrift for lhsan Abbas, ed. Wadad al-Qadi (Beirut: American
University of Beirut, 1981), 151–163, at 156. See also Mirella Cassarino, L’aspetto
morale e religioso nell’opera di Ibn al-Muqaffa (Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino
Editore, 2000), 101–114.
55. For example, Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 189–
196; Nagy, La pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffa , 49–74; Cassarino, L’aspetto morale e religioso
nell’opera di Ibn al-Muqaffa , 35–46.
56. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam, 35.
57. Momen, An Introduction to Shi i Islam, 75, 166; Najam Haider, Shī ī Islam: An
Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 96–100; Heinz Halm,
Die Schia (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 21–26; Mohammad
Ali Amir-Moezi, The Divine Guide in Early Shi ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam,
trans. David Streight (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 65–68.
58. Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 87. See further Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1: 289–291. And more generally,
see Hugh Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate: A Political History (London: Croom
Helm, 1981), 96–114; Kennedy, “al-Mahdī,” EI 5: 1238–1239.
59. Al- abarī, Tārīkh, 3: 483; English translation in The History of al- abarī, vol. 29: Al-
Man ūr and al-Mahdi, trans. Hugh Kennedy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1985), 194. More generally, see Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate, 97.
60. Al- abarī, Tārīkh, 3: 479–480 (English transition: Al-Man ūr and al-Mahdi, 190
[with modification]).
61. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 88.
62. Al- abarī, Tārīkh, 3: 480 (English transition: Al-Man ūr and al-Mahdi, 191 [with
modification]).
63. Al- abarī, Tārīkh al-rusul wa l-mulūk, 3: 481 (English transition: Al-Man ūr and al-
Mahdi, 192 [with modification]).
64. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam, 7–8.
234 Notes

65. Perhaps most dramatically and artificially in Mahmood Ibrahim, “Religious

Inquisition as Social Policy: The Persecution of the Zanadiqa in the Early Abbasid
Caliphate,” ASQ 16.2 (1994): 53–72, at 55–56.
66. Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam, 122.
67. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 12.
68. Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 62.
69. Al- abarī, Tārīkh 3: 499 (English transition: Al-Man ūr and al-Mahdi, 214). See fur-
ther Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de l’hegire, 63.
70. de Blois, “Zindīk,” 512.
71. Ibn al-Nadīm relates a story that subsequent to the period under discussion here,
Manichaeans freely migrated back and forth between Transoxania and Iraq, and
that, during the reign of al-Mu tadir (r. 295–320/908–932), the Manichaeans in
Samarqand were actually protected from the Muslim overlords through an inter-
vention of “the king of China.” See Ibn al-Nadim, Kitāb al-fihrist, 2: 337 (English,
2: 802–803). The story, according to de Blois, “bristles with anachronisms and has
little historic value.” See his “Zindīk,” 512 .
72. For example, al- abarī, Tārīkh, 3: 499, 519, 522 (English transition: Al-Man ūr and
al-Mahdi, 214, 237, 241).
73. Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate, 97–98.
74. On the denial of any connection, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Religion and Politics
Under the Early Abbāsids: Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden: Brill, 1997),
136–138. He argues that whereas al-Mahdī’s mi na was an attempt to weed out heresy,
al-Ma mūn’s, on the contrary, was directed “at those who defined themselves in oppo-
sition to ‘heretics,’ ‘innovators’ ” (136).
75. On al-Ma mūn’s mi na more generally, see John A. Nawas, “A Reexamination of
Three Current Explanations for al-Ma mun’s Introduction of the Mi na,” IJMES
26.4 (1994): 615–629; Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates
(London: Longman, 1986), 163–170; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of
Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), 178–285; Dominique
Sourdel, “La politique religieuse du calife abbaside al-Ma mun,” REI 30 (1962): 27–
48; Ira M. Lapidus, “The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early
Islamic Society,” IJMES 6 (1975): 363–385; Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph, 93–96;
Turner, Inquisition in Early Islam, 118–150.
76. Though, as Nawas duly notes, “The promulgation of the doctrine and the order for
enforcing its acceptance were not simultaneous; the first preceded the second by six
years. They therefore cannot be treated, although it is often done, as a single event,
because the circumstances that prompted al-Ma mūn to set the mi na in motion may
well have been different from those that led him to declare that the Qur an was cre-
ated.” See Nawas, “A Reexamination of Three Current Explanations for al-Ma mun’s
Introduction of the Mi na,” 615.
77. See al-Ma mūn’s letter quoted in al-Tabari, Tārīkh, 3: 1112; English transition in The
History of al- abarī, vol. 32: The Reunification of the Abbasid Caliphate: The Caliphate
of al-Ma mun, A.D. 813–833/A.H. 198–218, trans. C. E. Bosworth (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1985), 199–200.
78. See the comments in Chokr, Zandaqa et zindiqs en Islam au second siècle de
l’hegire, 12–14.
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 Index

al- Abbās b. Abd al-Mu alib, 145, 148 anti-Judaism, 102

Abbāsids, 10, 16, 23, 50, 57, 78, 82, anti-Semitism, 102
176–179, 180, 183 Apocalypse of Sergius Ba īrā, 95–96
Abdallāh ibn Mas ūd, 127 Arabian Peninsula, 11, 13, 14, 20, 21, 23,
Abdallāh Ibn Saba 4, 102–107, 126, 144, 24, 30, 44, 45–48, 51, 52, 57, 62, 71,
149, 151, 160, 161, 162, 173, 179 82, 87, 101, 116
Abdallāh Ibn Salām, 99, 107–109, 110 expulsion of non-Muslims from, 46–47
Abdallāh Ibn Yasār, 160, 161 Jewish communities within, 93–95, 116
Abd al-Jabbār, 120, 136, 183 See also ijāz; Mecca; Medina
Abd al-Karīm b. Abī al- Awgha, 177 Arabic language, 21, 81, 82, 85, 129
Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān, 47 See also Qur ān
Abd al- Ra man ibn Ghanm, 53 Arabness, 78–81, 82–87
Abd al-Razzāq al- an ānī, 46, 55 Arameans, 172
Abraham (Ibrāhīm), 19, 26, 27, 31, arīf al-zanādiqa, 168
32, 33, 34, 41, 60, 62, 63, 76, 84, 85, al- Askarī, asan b. Alī, 156
113, 114 al-Azdī, Abū Ismā īl, 131
Abū Bakr (al- iddīq), 104, 144,
145–146, 148 Baghdad, 43, 58, 59, 81, 87, 147, 166, 176
Abū Bakr al- ur ūshī, 49 al-Baghdādī, Abd al-Qāhir ibn āhir, 147
Abū Isā al-Warraq, 171 Ba īra, 4, 60–63, 81, 95–96, 117, 126, 138
Abū ālib, 60–61 al-Balādhurī, A mad ibn Ya ya, 87–88
Abū Tammām, 79 Banū Hāshim, 89, 145
Abū Ubaydah, 82 Banū Qaynuqā 41, 108
adab, 88 See also Jews
Adam, 60, 62, 172 Banū Quray a, 53
ahl al-bayt, 146, 147 Banu Sa ida, 144
ahl al-dhimma, 53, 168, 169 Bashear, Suliman, 50
ahl al-kitāb, 16, 32, 35, 37, 49, 64, 99, 111, Basra, 178, 179, 180
168, 169, 174 bā in, 150
ahl al-sunna, 107, 148, 149–150, 151, 153, Beeston, A. F. L., 116
154, 156, 158, 161, 164, 185 bid a, 114, 149, 189
A mad b. Mūsā b. Ja far, 153 al-Bīrūnī, 172
Ahmed, Shahab, 11 Brakke David, 69–70
Ā ishah, 100
Alī al-Ri a, 153 Cairo, 59
Alī ibn Abī ālib, 46, 62, 104, 106, 127, Chokr, Melhem, 177, 182
144–147, 149, 153, 160, 161, 180 Christianity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 31, 33, 44, 50, 69, 70,
Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad Ali, 146 81, 93, 96, 97, 99, 106, 116, 117–141,
Ancient Near East, 19, 56, 71 152, 154, 160, 163, 165, 170, 183, 184
an ār, 52 devolution of, 120–122
Anthony, Sean, 104–105, 106 Islamic critique of, 136–140
260 Index

Christians, 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 24, al-Hādī, 183

25, 26, 27, 29, 33, 39, 45, 47, 50, 53, adīth, 2, 13, 14, 44, 46, 49, 55, 57, 74, 79,
60, 94, 97, 98–99, 113, 117–141, 143, 100, 101, 109, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149,
152, 164, 169, 171, 174, 188 150, 165, 166, 176, 183, 187
good v. bad, 4, 81, 126 zindīqs and the falsification of, 176–179
in Islamic exegesis, 122–128, 188 adīth folk, 166, 177, 182
qur ānic Christians, 120–122 anīf (pl. unafā ), 25, 26, 32, 33, 34,
true Christians as Muslims, 125 35, 41, 63
Christology, 35, 120, 124, 131, 137, 141, 188 and Muhammad, 31
Chrysostom, John, 21 neither Jew nor Christian, 32–33
Church of Mary, 50 opposite of mushrik, 31, 34
Cohen, Mark, 54 Hārūn al-Rashīd, 171, 183
Commander of the Faithful (amīr al- asan ibn Alī ibn Abī ālib, 147, 161
mu minīn), 106, 110, 127, 168, 179, Hawting G. R, 34, 35
181, 182 Hebrew Bible, 113. See also Torah
community of believers, 22–23, 30, 62, 80, Henderson, John B., 8
94, 100, 112, 153, 154, 163, 167 heresiography, 15, 95, 111, 152
companions (al- a āba), 57, 74, 98, 101, heresiology, 106, 136, 147, 152, 163
147, 149, 150, 155, 157, 158, 176 heresy, 3, 4, 7, 10, 16, 69, 70, 111, 131, 151,
comparison, 21, 61, 143, 154–155, 160, 167, 169, 170, 177, 178
162–163 heretic. See zindīq
Constantine, 2–3 heterodoxy, 2, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 70, 89, 111,
Constitution of Medina (dustūr 130, 143, 148, 158, 189
al-madīna), 37, 51–53, 98 ijāz, 45–48, 65, 66, 81, 95, 103, 114
Cook, Michael, 71 See also Arabian Peninsula
Cordoba, 87, 159 ijra, 116
Crone, Patricia, 34, 35, 170 al- illī, 155, 156, 157
imyarite Ra manism, 116
Damascus, 43, 50, 53, 105 al- īra, 124
Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyāma), 20, Hodgson, Marshall G. S., 166, 177
35, 38, 180 House of David, 160–161
dhimmi. See ahl al-dhimma Hoyland, Robert, 78, 80
Dome of the Rock, 47 usayn ibn Alī ibn Abī ālib, 147, 161
Donner, Fred, 11, 22–23, 30, 37 hypocrites. See munāfiqūn

Egypt, 2, 50, 103 Ibn Abbās, Abdallāh, 55, 100

El-Hibri, Tayeb, 109, 111 Ibn Abd Rabbih, 87–89, 159
Eusebius of Caesarea, 2–3 Ibn anbal, A mad, 21, 46, 127, 156
Ezra, 45, 47 Ibn azm, 111, 112–113, 114, 115, 137,
148–151, 152, 154, 155
Fā imah, 145 Ibn Hishām, Abd al-Malik, 33, 41, 56–66,
fitna (first), 105 76, 97, 98, 99
Fowden, Garth, 3 Ibn Is āq, Mu ammad, 57–59, 65
futū literature, 48, 131 Ibn Kalbī, Hishām ibn Mu ammad,
76–77, 82
ghulāt, 106, 160 Ibn Man ūr, 75
Golgotha, 50, 127 Ibn Mas ūd, Abd Allāh, 127
Griffith, Sidney, 24 Ibn al-Muqaffa 177, 178–179
Gruen Eric S., 123 Ibn al-Nadīm, 169, 171–176
 Index 261

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, 158 jahl, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77

Ibn Qutayba, 82–89 Janson, Johannes J. G., 36
Ibn Rashīq, 78 Jeremiah, 64–65
Ibn al-Rawāndī, 171 Jerusalem, 30, 47, 48, 50, 108, 110, 180
Ibn Sa d, 109 Jesus, 26, 29, 32, 34, 35, 47, 48, 60, 98, 103,
Ibn Sayfī al-Nu mān, Abū Āmir Abd 105, 106, 108, 109, 118, 120–121, 122,
Amr, 41 125, 126, 127, 136, 137, 169, 172–173
Ibn Taymiyya, Taqī al-Dīn A mad ibn Jews, 1, 4, 8, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 25–
Abd al- alīm, 111–112, 114, 115, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41, 45,
120, 138–140, 155–159, 160, 161 46, 48–49, 51, 52–53, 56–62, 64, 65,
Ibn Ubayy, Abd Allāh, 41 75, 81, 93–116, 133–134, 138, 143,
idolatry, 21, 34, 140 171, 184, 188
See also mushrikūn; shirk banū Isrā īl v. al-yahūd, 25, 29, 60
i jāz al-qur ān, 21 and denial of Jesus’s resurrection, 98
ijmā 148, 156 good v. bad, 4, 107, 116, 125
Imāms. See Shī a (Shī ism) as literary stereotype, 51
īmān, 37, 38, 39 in medieval Islamic heresiographical
See also mu minūn tradition, 111–115
Imrū al-Qais, 124 and motif of deceit, 95–97
in irāf, 189 as Shī a, 159–162
Isaac, 60, 84, 113 jizya, 56, 171
Ishmael (Ismā īl), 60, 62, 63, 76, 80, Josephus, 80
84, 85, 95 Judaism, 1, 13, 14, 23, 31, 44, 50, 58, 81, 93,
Islam 97, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111–112, 114,
articulation of, 1, 5, 6, 10, 15, 58, 101, 116, 119, 122, 130, 133, 140, 152, 173,
106, 107, 111, 120, 132, 140, 143, 179, 184
174, 177
framers of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 14, 21, 33, 42, 47, Ka b al-A bār, 4, 95–96, 107, 109–111,
48, 57, 59, 90, 100, 116, 119, 121, 122, 125, 156
126, 130, 141, 168, 184, 187, 188 ka ba, 25, 76, 85
and late antiquity, 8, 24, 116, 124 kāffa, 137
Islamic studies, 7 kāfir (pl. kāfirūn or kuffār), 37, 38–40, 42,
Sunnī-centrism of, 12 46, 48, 73, 74, 80, 81, 150, 169, 171, 178
tensions with religious studies, 12 kalām, 144, 170, 184. See also
Ismā īl ibn Kathīr, 158 mutakallimūn
Ismā īlism, 152 karbalā, 145
isrā īliyyāt, 58, 109, 110, 125 Khawārij, 149
al-Kishshī, 106
jāhiliyya, 14, 67, 68–90, 94 Kister, M. J., 49
abrogated by Islam, 75–77 Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays, 145, 148
as age of heroism, 77–80 kufr, 20, 38, 40, 75, 115, 139, 150
and Arab identity, 75
counterpoint to Islam, 75 Lapidus, Ira, 181
imprecision of, 69 late antiquity, 1, 2, 8, 22, 24, 59, 93, 116,
as Islam’s past, 69, 72, 77 118, 123, 124
as pre-Islamic map, 71, 77, 80–81 Latin, 131
typology of, 72–75 Lauzière, Henri, 143
al-Jā i , Abū Uthmān Amr ibn Ba r, 23, Lecker, Michael, 52
117–118, 125, 137–138 Lieu, Samuel N. C., 169
262 Index

al-Mahdī (caliph), 16, 168, 170, 171, 179, Mu izz al- Dawlah, 176
180–184, 186 mul id, 169–170
al-Māliqī, 108–109 mu minūn (sg. mu min), 13, 23, 29, 31,
al-Ma mūn, 171–172, 173, 177, 181, 36–40, 52, 53, 56, 80
183–184 qur ānic definition of, 37
Mandaeans, 172 See also Commander of the Faithful
Mani, 169, 172, 174–175 (amīr al-mu minīn); īmān
Manicheans, 15, 133, 167, 169, 171–172, munāfiqūn (sg. munāfiq), 13, 31, 36–41,
175–176. See also zindīq 42, 61, 98, 178, 181
al-Man ūr, Abū Ja far, 50, 58, 178 and “the Jews” 41
al-Maqrīzī, Taqī al-Dīn, 147 Munt, Harry, 45, 46
Marcionites, 174 Muqātil Ibn Sulaymān, 75, 126
ma rifa, 155, 158 Murji a, 149
mawālī, 129 murtad, 169
Mecca, 5, 24, 30, 38, 45, 48, 50, 62–63, 76, mushrikūn (sg. mushrik ), 13, 16, 31, 32,
85, 95, 99, 124, 131, 178, 180 34–36, 39, 42, 45–46, 48, 73, 81, 89,
non-Muslims in, 45–46, 48 131, 172
Medina, 5, 24, 37, 41, 46, 51–53, 57, 61, 65, muslimūn, 13, 23, 26, 34, 36, 53, 56, 80, 126
95, 98, 99, 108, 109, 114, 116, 144 mutakallimūn, 2, 175
Jews of, 37, 52, 65, 75 See also kalām
See also Constitution of Medina Mu tazila, 149, 154, 170, 183
Melchert, Christopher, 166, 182
mi na, 16, 161, 167, 176, 177, 181, 182, al-Nābigha (pre- Islamic poet), 72–73
183, 184, 186 na , 148, 153, 154
Millar, Fergus, 133–134 Nestorianism, 95, 124
Monophysite Church, 124 Neuwirth, Angelika, 24
monotheism/s, 8, 9, 16, 19, 20, 21, 27, 30, New Testament, 26, 29, 49, 121, 141
32, 34–37, 42, 46, 47, 48, 56, 59, 61, Newby, Gordon, 58
63, 71, 77, 85, 87–89, 94, 97, 101, Noah (Nū ), 37, 76
118–119, 124, 136, 166, 168, 175, 188 non-Muslims, 4, 7, 20, 22, 24, 27, 45, 46,
Morony, Michael, 135 47–48, 51, 53–56, 66, 74, 79, 102, 130,
Moses (Mūsā), 3, 20, 26, 29, 96–97, 104, 135, 184, 185
113–114, 126, 161 as bearers of proto-Islam, 6, 15
mu āra a al-Qur ān, 168, 178 as corrupters, 6, 14
Mu āwiya ibn Abī Sufyān, 50, 111, 127, 181 taxonomies of, 22
muhājirūn, 52 See also Christians; Jews; Zoroastrians
Muhammad, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, 19, 21, 24–29,
31–32, 41, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 57, 59, occultation (ghayba), 156–157
61–62, 73, 74, 78, 80, 85, 104–106, Öljäytü, 155
110, 114, 122, 125, 126, 129, 139, orthodoxy, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, 16, 46, 49,
144, 145, 155, 161, 170, 176, 181, 183, 69–71, 89, 95, 106, 111, 128, 130, 131,
184, 188 135–136, 143, 147, 148, 151, 155, 158,
and Abraham, 32 163, 165, 169, 175, 179–185, 186, 187
and Ba īra, 60, 95, 95–96 orthopraxy, 164
and jāhiliyya, 73–74, 75–76, 89
and Jews of Medina, 37, 52–53, 75, 93, Pact of Umar (shurū Umar), 51, 53–56,
98–99, 100–103, 108 131–136
See also Sīra Paul, 4, 118, 126, 136–137, 160, 179
 Index 263

Paul of Antioch, 139 Second Temple, 93, 118

polytheism, 21, 33, 34, 65, 98. See al-Sha bī, Amir ibn Sharā īl, 159
also shirk al-Shāfi ī, Mu ammad ibn Idrīs, 156
polytheists. See mushrikūn al-Shahrastānī, 111, 112, 114, 115, 143,
147, 151–155, 163
Qur ān, 1, 5–6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 19–42, 49, 56, sharaf, 87
59, 64, 70, 73, 80, 94, 97, 103, 113, sharī a, 150, 184
118, 129, 137, 141, 144, 148, 150, al-Shaybānī, Mu ammad b. al- asan, 46
155, 157, 161, 165, 168, 172, 177, 178, Shī a (Shī ism), 4, 7, 9–10, 15, 104, 107,
183, 185 137, 139, 140, 141, 142–164, 165, 166,
back-projections onto, 5, 45, 66, 186 170, 180, 184, 185
Christians in, 120–122 as “Jews of our umma” 10, 159–162
distinct from New and Old as “rejectors” (al-rāfi a), 15, 143
Testaments, 49 and Sunnī-centrism, 144
and generic Jews and Christians in, shirk, 34, 35, 75, 140. See also mushrikūn
24–30, 119 Shoemaker, Stephen, 45, 47
and indigenous categories, 13, 19 Shu ūbiyya, 83–84
and jāhiliyya, 70–71 al- iddīqūn, 174
and late antiquity, 24 Sīra, 13, 14, 41, 44, 52, 57, 97
non-Muslims in, 24 and the creation of Muhammad, 58–66
and qur ānic actors, 5, 44 miraculous tales in, 44
skeptical approach to, 11 See also Ibn Hishām
technical terms in, 39 Sizgorich, Thomas, 21, 123
unbelievers in, 34–36, 40–41 Smith, Jonathan Z., 20, 163
See also Arabic language Stetkevych, Jaroslav, 76, 77
Quraysh, 52, 62, 99, 105, 144 Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney, 78–79, 82
Qutb, Sayyid, 68 Stroumsa, Sarah, 170
Stroumsa, Sarah and Guy
al-Rāfi a. See Shī a (Shī ism) G. Stroumsa, 169
rashidūn, 104, 105, 127, 142, 146 stubbornness, 4, 16, 56, 64, 65, 118
Renan, Ernst, 186, 187 Sulaym b. Qays al-Hilālī, 145
Robinson, Chase, 71 Sunna, 144, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158,
Rome, 3, 45, 135 161, 165, 176, 181, 182, 184. See also
Rubin, Uri, 100 ahl al-sunna
Sunnī-centrism, 7, 144
Saba iyya, 105, 106 Sunnism. See ahl al-sunna
Sabians ( ābi ūn), 25, 27, Syria, 2, 50, 60, 103, 124, 131
171–172, 173
safāha, 73 al- abarī, Abū Ja far Mu ammad ibn
ā ib al-zanādiqa, 173 Jarīr, 61–66, 68, 75, 103, 108, 109,
Sa īd b. Abd al- Azīz, 50 110, 124–125, 126, 180, 181, 182
Salih b. Abd al-Quddūs, 177 ta rīf (“tampering”), 5, 26, 84, 96, 146
Samaritanism, 133, 135 Tambiah, Stanley, 6
Sarah (biblical matriarch), 84 al-Tamīmī. See Sayf ibn Umar
Sasanian Empire, 1, 45, 181 al-Tamīmī
Savant, Sarah Bowen, 82, 83 Tannous, Jack, 11, 124, 127, 128
Sayf ibn Umar al-Tamīmī, 104–105, taw id, 34, 138, 168, 169, 175,
107, 126 183, 184
264 Index

ta wīl, 148 Vajda, Georges, 179

Theodosian Code, 2, 130, 131–135, 169
creation of an imperial religion, 131 Waldman, Marilyn, 39
definition of orthodoxy and heresy, Wansbrough, John, 24, 94–95
131–132 Wā il b. Atā 170
and Jews, 134–135 Wasserstrom, Steven M., 110, 111,
and Manicheanism, 133 159, 160
and religion, 22 Webb, Peter, 25, 71, 72, 74, 81, 82, 87
Theophanes the Confessor, 96–97 Wood, Philip, 22, 123, 129–130
al-Tirmidhī, Abū Īsā Mu ammad b. Īsā
b. Sawra, 74 al-Ya qūbī, 87
Torah, 93, 99, 101–102, 107, 109–110, Yūnus ibn Abd al-Ra mān, 106
114, 121, 125, 126, 160. See also
Hebrew Bible āhir, 148, 150
Toral-Niehoff, Isabel, 88 āhirī, 148
Turner, John P., 167, 179, 182 zakāt, 26, 29, 37
zandaqa, 167, 170, 176, 179, 184
Umar b. al- Khat āb, 45, 46, 50, 53, 104, ann, 34
108–111, 135 zindīq (pl. zanādiqa), 15–16, 164,
See also Pact of Umar (shurū Umar) 165–185
Umayyads, 23, 50, 87, 105, 159, 169, 178, as blasphemers, 168
179, 181 and falsification of adīth, 176–179
umma, 10, 14, 16, 27, 36, 51, 54, 68, 81, as freethinkers, 170–171
82, 83, 105, 107, 110, 117, 120, 123, as Manicheans, 171–176
130, 140, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 157, typology of, 168–172
158, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 177, 180, ziyāda, 189
182, 185 ziyāra, 155
Uthman ibn Affān, 103, 104, 105, Zoroastrianism, 13
108–109, 144 Zoroastrians, 4, 169