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 Topic: The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone

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  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     OP - September 23, 2014, 04:24 PM


    According to the publishers:
    Quote
    Patricia Crone's latest book is about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts subsequently triggered there, and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. The book also describes a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has demonstrated a remarkable persistence in Iran across a period of two millennia. The central thesis is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here, and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi'ism on Iran. This learned and engaging book by one of the most influential scholars of early Islamic history casts entirely new light on the nature of religion in pre-Islamic Iran, and on the persistence of Iranian religious beliefs both outside and inside Islam after the Arab conquest.


    Here's a pdf of part of the introduction:
    http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/18792/excerpt/9781107018792_excerpt.pdf

    More extracts from the book:
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LderHOzgLPUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #1 - September 23, 2014, 04:51 PM
    If you read standard Islamic history, conquering Islamic forces were benign and 'liberating'. Would be good to read a large focus history that examined the reality of Islamic imperialism across the middle-east, Persia, Africa, Asia, Europe as a counter to that kind of idealisation.
    "we can smell traitors and country haters"


    Quote from: arX on May 01, 2011, 03:33 AM
    God is Love.
    Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.

  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #2 - September 23, 2014, 05:03 PM
    Yes, I've thought the same. Something like a follow up to Tom Holland's book but dealing with the later Arab conquests.

    Here's a review of Patricia Crone:
    http://aliqapoo.com/2012/07/16/an-iranian-blend/
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #3 - September 23, 2014, 05:26 PM
    From the introduction:
    Quote
    At all events, there can be no doubt that there was massive resistance. But it was all in vain. The Persian empire could not be saved. ‘O men, see how Persia has been ruined and its inhabitants humiliated’, as the Arab poet al- Naˉ bigha al-Jaqdˉı (d. c. 70/690) said in illustration of the ephemeral nature of everything: ‘they have become slaves who pasture your sheep, as if their kingdom was a dream.’

    Thereafter a ghostly silence descends on the Persian plateau. In so far as we encounter Iranians in the next hundred years it is mostly in Iraq, where the Arabs had founded two garrison cities and where the bulk of the surviving sources for early Islamic history were compiled; but even there the sightings are few and far between. Like other non-Arabs the Iranians had to enter the Muslim community to acquire visibility.

    It was overwhelmingly as slaves and freedmen that they did so. It was standard practice in antiquity to enslave captives taken in war. The Arabs followed that practice, and both Muslim and non-Muslim sources give us to understand that the numbers they took were very large indeed. We are not usually offered any figures, but two Greek inscriptions relating to the Arab invasions of Cyprus in the 650s claim that 120,000 captives were carried off in the first invasion and about 50,000 in the second. We are hardly to take these figures at face value. The Romans are said to have enslaved 55,000 captives after their destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, and to have taken 100,000 captives in Severus’ war against the Parthians in 198 AD; it seems unlikely that the Arabs should have taken about the same number in two not particularly important campaigns in Cyprus. But the figures do convey a sense of the magnitudes involved.
    [...]
    Slaves were generally used in the house, where they did all the work nowadays done or facilitated by machines, and where they serviced the sexual needs of their masters too. Outside the home they supplied skilled labour as scribes, copyists and teachers, and as craftsmen and traders earning money for themselves and their masters, as well as unskilled labour of diverse kinds (again including sexual services); there was little agricultural slavery, no galley slavery, and no slavery for the exploitation of mines that we know of. Since most forms of slavery involved personal human contact with Muslims, most slaves ended up by adopting the religion of their captors, with momentous consequences for the latter. It was not just as Arabs that the conquerors were rapidly outnumbered in their own settlements, it was as Muslims too.

    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #4 - September 23, 2014, 05:37 PM
    Quote
    there can be no doubt that the Arabs were a very small minority in the non-Arab Near East. Unreliable though the figures are, they graphically illustrate the fact that the Arabs must soon have been outnumbered by non-Arabs even in their own settlements.


    From intro link above.

    And with a very early split into arab and Persian Islam, maybe it is actually only very small groups pretending to be powerful, much like the Wizard of Oz?
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #5 - September 23, 2014, 05:42 PM
    this is worth watching if you get a chance, lecture of Crone's linked from blog Zeca just posted. I had watched it before, and its interesting. She is a very significant figure.

    The Acculturated Native Who Rebels: Nativists, Nationalists, and Western-Born Jihadists in Historical Perspective

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQt1bCnDm4

    "we can smell traitors and country haters"


    Quote from: arX on May 01, 2011, 03:33 AM
    God is Love.
    Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.

  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #6 - September 23, 2014, 05:43 PM
    Quote
    Slaves were generally used in the house, where they did all the work nowadays done or facilitated by machines, and where they serviced the sexual needs of their masters too. Outside the home they supplied skilled labour as scribes, copyists and teachers, and as craftsmen and traders earning money for themselves and their masters, as well as unskilled labour of diverse kinds (again including sexual services); there was little agricul- tural slavery, no galley slavery, and no slavery for the exploitation of mines that we know of. Since most forms of slavery involved personal human contact with Muslims, most slaves ended up by adopting the religion of their captors, with momentous consequences for the latter. It was not just as Arabs that the conquerors were rapidly outnumbered in their own settlements, it was as Muslims too.

    Slaves were often manumitted. It is impossible to say with what frequency (slavery is one of the most under-studied topics of early Islamic history), but freedmen abound in the sources, and the Arabs accepted those of them who had converted as full members of their own polity. The freedman did suffer some disabilities vis-à-vis his manumit- ter, whose client (mawlaˉ) he became, but the effects of this were largely limited to private law; in public law freedmen had the same status as their captors.

    Of course, whatever the law might say, there was massive prejudice against them.37 Non-Arab freedmen were casually written off as slaves, awarded less pay in the army than their Arab peers, regarded as less valuable for purposes of blood-money and retaliation, and deemed utterly unacceptable in positions of authority such as prayer leaders, judges, governors, and generals, where their occasional appearance would be greeted with wild abuse. Free or freed, non-Arabs were deemed unsuitable as marriage partners for Arab women; aristocratic Arabs disliked the idea of giving daughters even to ‘half-breeds’ (sing. hajˉın), however elevated the fathers.38 Stories regarding Arab prejudice against their non-Arab clients are legion. Treated as outsiders, the clients (mawaˉlˉı) responded by congregating in their own streets, with their own separate mosques;39 but they stopped short of forming their own separate Muslim community and, for all the prejudice against them, they rapidly acquired social and political importance.

    A mere forty years after the conquests, when the Arabs were fighting their Second Civil War, slaves and freedmen participated as soldiers on several sides and played a conspicuous part in the movement that took control of Kufa under the leadership of the Arab al-Mukhtaˉ r (66–7/685–7). The slaves and freed- men in this revolt were mostly Iranians captured in the course of Kufan campaigns in north-western Iran, and they spoke an Iranian language (‘Persian’ to al-Dˉınawarˉı) among themselves.40 Clients, again many of them Iranians, dominated the civilian sector of Muslim society which emerged after the Second Civil War, and they rose to influential political positions too, though they continued to remain subordinate to the Arabs in military and political affairs throughout the Umayyad period (41– 132/661–750).41


    So this alleged golden age is built on slavery of outsiders with pre-existing skills?
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #7 - September 23, 2014, 06:09 PM
    Publications list for Patricia Crone with links to some of the articles:
    http://www.hs.ias.edu/crone/publications

    Some selections:

    Islam and Religious Freedom

    Jihad: Idea and History

    Barefoot and Naked: What did the Bedouin of the Arab Conquests Look Like?
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #8 - September 23, 2014, 06:47 PM
    One of my favorite articles about Crone, by the estimable Chase Robinson -- an excellent and entertaining read, slated for publication in an upcoming book about Crone.

    http://chaserobinson.net/files/2013/09/Crone-and-the-end-of-Orientalism.pdf

    Many great parts, but this citation of Crone's work is truly awesome, she is devastating on the incoherence of the traditional sirah.

    "A particularly good example of discrediting a witness appears in Meccan Trade, where she sets a jackhammer into the exegetical foundations of the sīra. The Qurʾān alludes to a journey in Sūrat Quraysh, but what are we to make of the accounts that explain it? The answer is worth reproducing nearly in full:

    The journeys, we are told, were the greater and lesser pilgrimages to Mecca: the ḥajj in Dhū’l-ḥijja and the ʿumra in Rajab. Alternatively, they were the migrations of Quraysh to Ṭāʾif in the summer and their return to Mecca in winter. Or else they were Qurashi trading journeys. Most exegetes hold them to have been trading journeys, but where did they go? Then went to Syria, we are told: Quraysh would travel by the hot coastal route to Ayla in the winter and by the cool inland route to Buṣrā and Adhriʾat in the summer. Or else they went to Syria and somewhere else, such as Syria and Rūm, however that is to be understood, or Syria and the Yemen, as is more commonly said: Quraysh would go to Syria in the summer and to the Yemen in the winter, when Syria was too cold, or else to Syria in the winter and the Yemen in the summer, when the route to Syria was too hot. Alternatively...

    In short, the sura refers to the fact that Quraysh used to trade in Syria, or in Syria and the Yemen, or in Syria and Ethiopia, or in all three, and maybe also in Iraq, or else to their habit of spending the summer in Ṭāʾif, or else to ritual visits to Mecca. It celebrates the fact that they began to trade, or that they continued to do so, or that they stopped; or else it does not refer to trade at all..."

    Holy shit, I die laughing every time I read that quote, it's magnificent.
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #9 - September 23, 2014, 09:16 PM
    She is a great scholar, I wonder if the next generation of Islamic history scholars will be on her level...
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #10 - September 23, 2014, 10:26 PM
    Learned dudes:

    Is there anything I can read that kind of breaks down all the sections of the Quran, and informs the reader of each respective section's probable roots (if those can be alluded to), their potential author(s), their relative age, and whether there are have been any later insertions in each section (and the possible origin of these).

    I've been working my way through all of Zoater's posts (backwards, for some reason), and this has really helped me kind of get the hazy picture. But now I am after a more definitive guide that I can hopefully read (forwards) and learn more from.
    Hi
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #11 - September 23, 2014, 10:57 PM
    Nothing like that exists musivore, and the reason is simple -- those things are unknown.  There is no scholarly consensus on who wrote the surahs, how they were written, how they were revised, how they were collected together into a mushaf, what language(s) they were written in, etc.  Unfortunately there isn't even any good resource, as far as I know, about the scholarly positions on these issues with respect to each surah.

    Personally I can summarize what I think the best theories are on these general points, but there's no consensus, and certainly not any single source that simply lays the issues out on a surah-by-surah basis. 

    Even the language(s) and script that the Qur'an was written in remains remarkably poorly known.

    It may be centuries (!) before somebody could write a book like you are suggesting.  Qur'anic studies are in their infancy compared to Biblical studies.  And at least the New Testament is perfectly readable Greek.  Parts of the Old Testament, on the other hand, do pose some similar linguistic issues to what you see with the Qur'an.  For the most part, authors of ancient religious texts are anonymous, and the same is undoubtedly true for the Qur'an in my book -- it is not a question of 'who wrote it,' but rather what types of people produced it and how.
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #12 - September 24, 2014, 05:07 AM
    @Zaotar

    Kinda off topic but do you know anything about the inclusion of the Christian Legend about Alexander being included in the Quran? Is this a passage that was added later because the Legend was written as a piece of Byzantine propaganda in 629. The two stories have identical elements to them and it seems nearly certain that one influenced the other and as Muhammad's Quran would not have been widely known enough to influence Christian propaganda written in the heart of Byzantium it would seem the Quran borrowed from the legend.
    "I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
    -Thomas Paine
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #13 - September 24, 2014, 07:37 AM
    Quote from: Zaotar on September 23, 2014, 10:57 PM
    Nothing like that exists musivore, and the reason is simple -- those things are unknown.  There is no scholarly consensus on who wrote the surahs, how they were written, how they were revised, how they were collected together into a mushaf, what language(s) they were written in, etc.  Unfortunately there isn't even any good resource, as far as I know, about the scholarly positions on these issues with respect to each surah.

    Personally I can summarize what I think the best theories are on these general points, but there's no consensus, and certainly not any single source that simply lays the issues out on a surah-by-surah basis. 

    Even the language(s) and script that the Qur'an was written in remains remarkably poorly known.

    It may be centuries (!) before somebody could write a book like you are suggesting.  Qur'anic studies are in their infancy compared to Biblical studies.  And at least the New Testament is perfectly readable Greek.  Parts of the Old Testament, on the other hand, do pose some similar linguistic issues to what you see with the Qur'an.  For the most part, authors of ancient religious texts are anonymous, and the same is undoubtedly true for the Qur'an in my book -- it is not a question of 'who wrote it,' but rather what types of people produced it and how.


    Shame. It seems I'm looking for shortcuts that don't exist....wish I could fast forward a few centuries sometimes, and see how much we know in relation to a number fields.

    If you could summarise some of what you know, I'd massively appreciate it. I hope it doesn't take you too long to write, but I really look forward to reading it. Let me know if you'd like me to start another thread for it?

    Hi
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #14 - September 24, 2014, 08:18 AM
    I see no reason why what m is proposing should not be done quite quickly.

    The computer power that is available now is very impressive.

    In fact, I propose the skills required to carry out a large proportion of this work are here.

    Some form of wiki koran.

    List all the possible meanings of something with all the possible reasons why that statement was created - as for example the bits about Alexander may have originated in Byzantine propaganda.

    Patterns will emerge that make more sense than other possible patterns.



    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #15 - September 24, 2014, 08:22 AM
    We have a jigsaw with missing parts.  But we have more than enough to work most of it out and draw reasonable conclusions about the missing bits.
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #16 - September 24, 2014, 08:23 AM
    The main problem is that there is a very loud chorus shouting "but it looks like this"!
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #17 - September 24, 2014, 09:20 AM
    The Alexander Romance is Syriac, not Greek,  and there are also elements of the story that appear on an Arabic poem by Umr Al Qays.
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #18 - September 24, 2014, 11:09 AM
    But Syria was under Byzantium - ie Greek - control!  Egypt was Greek then!
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #19 - September 24, 2014, 11:14 AM
    The Ptolemys were Greek, were they not?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #20 - September 24, 2014, 11:24 AM
    yes they were

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom

    Egypt was ruled by a Hellenic dynasty
    "we can smell traitors and country haters"


    Quote from: arX on May 01, 2011, 03:33 AM
    God is Love.
    Love is Blind. Stevie Wonder is blind. Therefore, Stevie Wonder is God.

  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #21 - September 24, 2014, 12:41 PM
    As far as I know Greek was the language of administration for the region (Syria, Palestine, Egypt etc.) from Alexander's time to the end of the seventh century, so including the first sixty years or so of Arab rule. The change over to Arabic as the official language of the Caliphate was a crucial historical event.

    Edit: As I remember this BBC Radio 3 broadcast by Hugh Kennedy on 'The Establishment of the Islamic State' (the original one, that is) talks about the importance of the change of language:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j9mcx
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #22 - September 24, 2014, 01:11 PM
    For example, Istanbul is a Greek city.....
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #23 - September 24, 2014, 01:31 PM
    It was the Greek city. In Greek newspapers it's still usually referred to as 'i poli', i.e. 'the city' or if you're saying 'in the city' or 'to the city' it's 'stin poli', hence Istanbul in Turkish.
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #24 - September 24, 2014, 02:48 PM
    Have people looked at language as a weapon of war?

    I understand that learning another language gives you another way to look at the world.

    Might forcing everyone to speak Arabic have actually forced them to change how they thought, and changing religion becomes part of the change?  In some ways it is a terrifying way to change someone, really getting at their identity.

    And I get the impression that koranic Arabic is artificial, like esparanto.
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #25 - September 24, 2014, 03:40 PM
    Quote
    I understand that learning another language gives you another way to look at the world.

    In my experience that's true, but in a subtle way. It isn't anything dramatic.

    Quote
    Might forcing everyone to speak Arabic have actually forced them to change how they thought, and changing religion becomes part of the change?  

    I don't think it would have been a case of forcing anyone to speak in Arabic. What was imposed was the use of Arabic as the language of administration, and hence of writing and education. The change to Arabic as the main spoken language would have taken place over centuries. Coptic was still being spoken in Egypt in the sixteenth century, Latin in Tunisia in the fifteenth century and a few Syrians still speak Aramaic. For most of the Islamic Golden Age Arabic would have been a minority spoken language in most of what are now considered Arab countries.

    I think the change of religion must have been linked to the changeover to Arabic but that's a more complicated historical question.
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #26 - September 24, 2014, 03:55 PM
    But isn't this the language of god?
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #27 - September 24, 2014, 03:57 PM
    So they say.
    Which side are you on?
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #28 - September 24, 2014, 04:29 PM
    Quote from: moi on September 24, 2014, 02:48 PM
    Have people looked at language as a weapon of war?

    I understand that learning another language gives you another way to look at the world.

    Might forcing everyone to speak Arabic have actually forced them to change how they thought, and changing religion becomes part of the change?  In some ways it is a terrifying way to change someone, really getting at their identity.

    And I get the impression that koranic Arabic is artificial, like esparanto.


    There is a long, complex, and bitter scholarly battle over what, exactly, Arabic is and how/when the modern spoken Arabic dialects emerged, as well as what their relation is to Qur'anic Arabic.

    I think this young scholar Al Jallad is absolutely brilliant and am following his scholarship closely ... based on fantastically sophisticated analysis of all of the available evidence for pre-Islamic Arabic, he argues for the 'polygenesis' view of Arabic, which is essentially that Arabic languages were already widespread through the Levant and Mesopotamia PRIOR to the conquests, and that the Arabic dialects largely developed from these prior forms, NOT from the Qur'an or from invading Arabs. .

    http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lias/organisation/arabic/aljalladam.html

    But the very fact that such new research is so productive and revolutionary is partly why I say it's currently impossible to write any sort of definitive text on the Qur'an as a whole.  Arabic itself is so badly known, and Qur'anic Arabic in particular, that it's just not possible.  Probably what you have in the standard Cairo text of the Qur'an, in my estimation, is an artificial language that was never spoken -- the Qur'an's base rasm was probably first written in Northern Arabic dialects of the Levant (certainly it used their script, a Nabatean derivative), and later recompiled in an Eastern Arabian peninsula dialect, then subsequently 'read' through a highly artificial imputation of Bedouin archaic speech.  This of course is a modified version of Vollers' hypothesis, modified to include the "Nabatean/Aramaic" theories about the Qur'an's likely origin in the Levant, rather than the Hijaz.  What is one to say about such a deformed textual language?  It was never a real spoken language, but is rather a sociolinguistic ideal imposed on a composite text; the dialects are the real spoken Arabic.  As Vollers would say, volkssprache und schriftsprache.  Modern Standard Arabic is essentially an artificial language that attempts to turn the schriftsprache into a spoken language -- in that sense you are right that it's like esperanto.

    We need a FAR better grasp of Arabic, and a far better grasp of Qur'anic orthography, before even basic steps can be taken for a scientific analysis of the Qur'an.  Barring that, all we have are periodic insights into the background specific issues and surahs/verses.
  • The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran - Patricia Crone
     Reply #29 - September 24, 2014, 04:49 PM
    Quote from: justperusing on September 24, 2014, 05:07 AM
    @Zaotar

    Kinda off topic but do you know anything about the inclusion of the Christian Legend about Alexander being included in the Quran? Is this a passage that was added later because the Legend was written as a piece of Byzantine propaganda in 629. The two stories have identical elements to them and it seems nearly certain that one influenced the other and as Muhammad's Quran would not have been widely known enough to influence Christian propaganda written in the heart of Byzantium it would seem the Quran borrowed from the legend.


    In my view it's dead certain that the Qur'an is referring to the Syriac text, and also that the Qur'an presumes that its audience is already familiar with and already knows that specific story.  What's particularly interesting (as you probably know) is how the Syriac text explains so many otherwise baffling aspects of the Qur'an's version of the story.

    There is a phenomenal essay on this subject by Kevin van Bladel in the book "The Qur'an in its Historical Context."  I believe you can find a free pdf on the Internet, or rent it for cheap on a Kindle.  It is a powerhouse demonstration of how badly traditional Muslims have misread the Qur'an by interpreting it as a pagan artifact, rather than a product of literate Northern Judaeo-Christian society, particularly *Syriac* language and culture.

    This obviously has numerous implications, including (a) though it is in an Arabic dialect(s), the Qur'an was produced in a literate environment that was highly familiar with Syriac written texts from the orthodox Syriac tradition; (b) given the late composition of this text, the sections of the Qur'an referring to this story were likely written after Mohammed's death, or, alternatively, traditional Muslim chronology is wrong about the date of his death (both are equally likely explanations in my view).  Van Bladel argues that the Syriac text must have been distributed widely and quickly so that it reached Mecca and Medina very fast, but the more sensible explanation is that this portion of the Qur'an is not "Meccan/Medinan" at all.

    Btw, I can't resist quoting part of that article, because it always irritates me when people think of Mohammed's followers as following a radically different religion from Christianity.  People forget that Christianity and early Islam in this time period, in my view, had a virtually identical message about the impending apocalypse (which, after all, is EXACTLY WHAT THE QUR'AN SAYS OVER AND OVER, and yet which people inexplicably ignore .... just amazing).  At any rate, here's the quote:

    "It is often over-looked that Jesus was thought even by Christians to be prophesying nothing less than the end of the world (as in Matthew 24 and Luke 21:5–28), and that this would be preceded by a siege of Jerusalem (Luke 21:20). The sack of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614 therefore shocked Christian contemporaries especially because it seemed to indicate that the end the world and the return of the Messiah were near according to the very words of Jesus. Other signs predicted by Jesus preceding the end would be seen in the heavens, and there would be “distress of nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves” (Luke 21:25). Contemporary sources show that witnesses to the great war of 603–30 saw the fulfillment of Jesus’ words in it."

    This is the regional context in which Mohammed emerged, an expectation of imminent judgment and bodily resurrection of the dead in connection with the Messiah's return.  This is the religion he preached.  It is the religious view expressed in the Alexander Legend.  It was almost identical to the religion of Christianity more generally, and could be summarized as sort of a monotheistic consensus view in the region.  This fundamental identity is often missed by people who see Christianity and Islam through the vast apparatus that was slowly overlaid on their original texts.  Ironic that Mohammed himself was making that exact point re Christianity (that Jesus was just a messenger bringing this message of divine imminent judgment and resurrection), and then almost the exact same thing happened to his preaching.
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