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 Topic: Qur'anic studies today

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  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1050 - September 16, 2016, 04:19 PM
    Maybe the real question, and the historical oddity, is how monogamy came to be the custom in the Greek and Roman worlds, and as a consequence in Christianity.

    Walter Scheidel - Monogamy and polygyny in Greece, Rome, and world history
    Quote
    Greek and Roman men were not allowed to be married to more than one wife at a time and not meant to cohabit with concubines during marriage, and not even rulers were exempt from these norms. That these facts have generally received little attention and occasioned no surprise among historians specializing in this period bespeaks a remarkable lack of cross-cultural awareness. Greco-Roman monogamy may well appear unexceptional from a modern Western perspective but was far from common at the time. My paper seeks to put this institution in context.

    Quote
    Moving on to the Greco-Roman world, elite polygyny looms large in the Homeric tradition. By the historical period, by contrast, SIUM [Socially Imposed Universal Monogamy] was firmly established as the only legitimate marriage system: polygamy was considered a barbarian custom or a mark of tyranny and monogamy was regarded as quintessentially “Greek.” However, SIUM co-existed with concubinage even for married men: as far as we can tell, they were supposed to draw the line at cohabitation, which was considered inappropriate. At the same time, married men’s sexual congress with their own slave women or with prostitutes was free of social and legal sanction. As several probable instances among both the Argead kings and later Hellenistic rulers show, polygamy persisted in “hellenized” Macedonia. There is no sign of an early polygamous tradition in Rome. Whether concubinage was feasible concurrently with marriage has been debated in modern scholarship and the evidence is inconclusive: it was not until the sixth century CE, after centuries of Christian influence, that the emperor Justinian claimed that “ancient law” prohibited husbands from keeping wives and concubines at the same time. As in Greece, sexual relations of married men with their own slave women were not unlawful, including relationships that resulted in offspring.

    Quote
    The true historical significance of Greco-Roman SIUM may well lie in its impact on the Christian tradition. The current (Catholic but generally representative) position that polygamy “is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive” betrays modern sensibilities and does not appear to be directly derived from earliest Christian doctrine. In the early fifth century CE Augustine called monogamy a “Roman custom.” Pauline Christianity may well have been monogamous because it evolved in a Greco-Roman context and not because of anything that was specific to this movement, let alone its latently polygamous Jewish background. If the Christian church(es) preserved SIUM as a Greco-Roman norm and if the more autonomous medieval ecclesiastical leadership was indeed a driving force behind the gradual reinforcement of SIUM and cognate practices, Greco-Roman emphasis on SIUM would deserve a prominent place in a comprehensive history of monogamy that has yet to be written.

    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1051 - September 16, 2016, 04:47 PM
    Actually monogamy v. polygamy may oversimplify the conflict.  The position of early Christianity was not so much monogamy as antigamy, i.e. that marriage sucked and was for the spiritually weak....this being Paul's pretty overt argument.  And if you were married, celibate marriage was the ideal to strive for.  This was not just Greco Roman peculiarity, the antigamy attitude was even more intense in early Syriac Christianity and Egyptian Christianity.  It seems consistent with the type of asceticism that was more pronounced in West Asian religious traditions than it was in the Latin West.

    So it wasn't 4 v. 1, so much as any v. 0.  It's not surprising that early Christianity didn't support polygamy, with this ascetic attitude.  Being married to one woman was bad enough.

    Now one of the most interesting aspects to me of the Qur'an is that its earliest surahs are very close to the Syriac position --- that celibacy is the spiritual ideal, and that those who seek wealth and sons are damned.  It's amazing to me that this isn't more widely noticed, which is probably because it gets glossed over with the idea of a poor and monogamous Meccan Muhammad, with no sons and just one old wife, Khadija (essentially paralleling a celibate Syriac marriage), who then goes wild in Medina; no disjunction can't be explained with speculative biography.  The promotion of ascetic piety in the earliest surahs gets buried in dogmatic exegesis and supposed Sitz im Leben.  Only Tor Andrae really focused closely on it.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1052 - September 16, 2016, 04:55 PM
    Zaotar - do you think it's possible there was a move among the early believers from Christian influenced monogamy (for the majority who couldn't live up to the ideal of celibacy) to polygamy at some point? Or is it more likely that polygamy was always the local custom?
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1053 - September 16, 2016, 05:10 PM
    From Scheidel again - it's interesting that the idea of a revival of polygamy appeared briefly during the reformation.
    Quote
    Greco-Roman SIUM was preserved and gradually reinforced by the Christian church which labored to suppress polygamy among Germans and Slavs at a time when the Arab conquests lent ideological support to polygamy in parts of the Mediterranean and across the Middle East. The Middle Ages, as SIUM spread as a by-product of Christianization, witnessed the church’s struggle against divorce and elite concubinage, practices whose curtailment would render monogamous precepts more effective. Ashkenazi Jewry followed this trend, highlighted by Gershom ben Judah’s ban of polygamy at a synod around 1000 CE. In western Europe, a brief spell of Anabaptist polygamy in Münster in 1535/6 (and, if true, a decree in Nürnberg in 1650 reacting to the lack of men after the Thirty Years War) was to be the final gasp of this practice,..

    Edit: more on Anabaptists and polygamy.
    Quote from: http://cheesewearingtheology.com/2012/04/life-for-women-in-munster-under-jan-mathjis-and-jan-leiden/
    Bernard Rothmann, one of the leaders of the Munster Anabaptists explains their position on polygamy in this way:

    "God has restored the true practice of holy matrimony amongst us. Marriage is the union of man and wife — ‘one’ has now been removed…Freedom in marriage for the man consists in the possibility for him to have more than one wife…[because] polygamy has not been forbidden by God." (A Reformation Reader, Janz, pg 223)

    In calling men to polygamy, Rothmann also called them to be the strong leaders of their home, because the women in Munster needed to be put in their proper (biblical) place:

    "Too often wives are the lords, leading their husbands like bears, and all the world is in adultery, impurity, and whoredom. Nowadays, too many women seem to wear the trousers. The husband is the head of the wife, and as the husband is obedient to Christ, so also should the wife be obedient to her husband, without murmuring or contradiction." (Janz, 223)

    The Anabaptists also seem to have produced their own jihadis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batenburgers
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1054 - September 16, 2016, 05:10 PM
    I don't think the believers were homogeneous.  I think they started out as a sort of innovative variant branch that split away from Christian soteriology, and then this branch was adapted into a facilitating vehicle for rising Arabian political and military aspirations.  In that adaptation, the old ascetic and unworldly ideology was overwritten with an ideology that focused on jihad.

    The deeper question is how much continuity there ever was between the so-called 'Meccan' believers, the Medinan believers, and the believer movement that later coalesced as early Islam.  This gets into how much stock you put into the Hijrah, a concept which has never made an iota of sense to me.  What cannot be denied is that the quranic corpus transitions from a context of passive ascetic believers into a context of militant jihad + affirming rather worldly sexual and familial behavior.  That the corpus makes that ideological transition doesn't mean it was embedded in a real-world community of believers that was going through those same changes.  In fact that strikes me as borderline impossible.  What you are looking at is plainly a type of compositional adaptation, not a social change in which (like Muhammad himself) a community of near-celibate pious ascetics suddenly goes full-bore jihadi.  Even the traditional Islamic narrative takes this into account by making Muhammad's Meccan followers miniscule in numbers.  It makes little sense to see a vast communal transformation from Syriac-type piety to the warring tribes mentality of the latest surahs like Q 5 and Q 9.  There must have been a shift in quranic composers and compositional context, a shift that facilitated the rise of Arabian political power.  Islamic tradition takes the same position, it just tries to explain that shift by moving its prophet and its community and radically dislocating them.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1055 - September 16, 2016, 05:21 PM
    Btw, there is one very interesting aspect of this that I've been thinking about recently.  In the early surahs, the messenger's elevated status is articulated with heavy use of Syriac Christian concepts for how the believer is divinized and assumes an eschatological body.  But there is also an interesting attempt, in the corpus, to isolate that ascetic divinization process within the prophetic typology (i.e., it's not for normal believers, just for messengers), and, in later surahs and interpolations, to suppress these concepts entirely and replace them with a political prophet who, as God's representative on Earth, the believers must obey.

    This would be consistent with a transition from a context in which the community idealizes elite believers who are completely unworldly and absolutely devoted to service of their world, thus becoming divinized, to a context in which believers are not seen as able to undergo divinization at all (that being Christian heresy), but are rather defined as politicized beings, and so are categorically distinct from a special class of prophetic beings who are given leadership of the community.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1056 - September 16, 2016, 05:23 PM
    Quote from: zeca on September 16, 2016, 04:55 PM
    Zaotar - do you think it's possible there was a move among the early believers from Christian influenced monogamy (for the majority who couldn't live up to the ideal of celibacy) to polygamy at some point? Or is it more likely that polygamy was always the local custom?


    Zeca, I've always thought, based on nothing but numbers that monogamy was the default.  Only the wealthy and powerful could maintain a harem, which barely leaves one female per male.  (Either that or high attrition of the male population through violence/wars etc).

    see:-
    Quote
    Lost boys (Mormon fundamentalism)
    "Lost boys" is a term used for young men who have been excommunicated or pressured to leave polygamous Mormon fundamentalism groups such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS).[1] They are alleged to be pressured to leave by adult men to reduce competition for wives within such sects, usually when they are between the ages of 13 and 21.[2]]


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_boys_(Mormon_fundamentalism)
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1057 - September 16, 2016, 05:48 PM
    1) Wars or slavery capture causing gender disproportions.  Society decides that orphans and widows need to be taken care of if it is to their advantage otherwise they would let them migrate, starve or just kill them.  So polygamy is introduced to solve the problem of excess females and their valuable male children who will grow up to be useful.  

     2) Tribal leaders get tribute wives given by smaller and weaker tribes or groups wishing to make alliances.  

    3) lesser humans want to emulate their leaders who have polygamous relationships or social status is determined by number of wives or children or SONS.   Yeah, pirate mo has more than four wives at a time because says the law is that every man can have up to four.   How many for ghengis khan?  

    4) pregnant women or DAUGHTERS are a strain on the household resources so either kill them at birth or sell them as slaves or marry them away.  Being a wife might be a slightly better existence (emphasis on existence) than being a slave.  This is for labour intense societies per industrial age: farming, building, pirating.  

    5) celibacy in monastries or convents were preferable to starving.  Although that alternative was not easily obtained.  The father was supposed to pay a dowry for daughter when she went into a convent.  The exchange would provide the family with favour in heaven.  

    6) ritual prostitution.  there are vestal virgins or temple prostitutes or geisha houses (indentured prostitute servants) so that is set up for men to benefit but the women and their families benefit from it.   But it is not all about sex because men can have sex with each other as did the ancient greeks who just kept wives around for business alliances and procreation.  It is more a question aboit how societies like to keep order.  

    7) Polyandrogeny is found in any culture?  Matriarchy is in few cultures.  

    I read an interesting sci fi novel "the moon is a harsh mistress" by the founder of cult. The polyandrogeny and matricahal was due to a prison colony in the moon being established were women were scarce.  So the women controlled who was let into the clan and who sleep with whom.  Of course this is FICTION and not scripture but give some few hundred years and it will all be the same.  

     So some women might like polyandrogency but it is not acceptable.  Having a couple of sugar daddies would be great.  What would happen?  Would the males kill each other or some get gender changes?

    So if one can answer why polyandrogency was not established so commonly then does it help answer the question about polygamy?  

    I apologize for not having the scholaristic style of some of you here.  
    The unreligion, only one calorie
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1058 - September 16, 2016, 06:43 PM
    ^No need to apologise - the more discussion the better.
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1059 - September 16, 2016, 07:40 PM
    That ancient 11000 year old town in turkey is fascinating genetically because children are not related to adults in households!

    And remember the converse, women having several male partners.

    This whole area is extremely poorly researched, and overladen with assumptions.

    Wasn't a key reason for ascetism belief in the second coming?
    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"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1060 - September 16, 2016, 07:56 PM
    Not exactly.  Paul's stated basis for opposing marriage was that the second coming was imminent.

    But in the Syriac/Egyptian tradition, asceticism became something very different.  It was a way to restore the glorified divine nature that man had lost in Adam's fall, substituting a divine Christ-like nature for worldly corruption.  This substitution effectively 'resurrected' the believer in historical time, transforming the body, making them a purified being that could experience paradise now, prior to the eschaton.  This was the path to salvation, becoming single-minded for the Lord, emptied of all selfish worldly desires, a vessel for the divine will, just as Christ was single-minded and obedient unto death.  Basically you became godlike.  You can see why this ideology was appealing, it was kind of like an RPG where by XP grinding you level yourself up into a cosmic hero who gains magical powers and then, upon death, you respawn in a magical realm for eternity.  Honestly if I thought it had an ounce of legitimacy, I'd sign up right now.

    This was eschatology-focused, to an obsessive degree, but it was not really centered on an imminent second coming in the historical sense that Paul held.  Whether the second coming came soon or not was basically irrelevant to the ascetic Eastern ideology of inescapable ultimate judgment that could be avoided by purifying and glorifying the self now, in historical time.  You want to play the RPG now, arduous as it might be, because you will start leveling up right away.

    The earliest surahs in the Qur'an are 100% derivative of that same ideology, in my view.  This, btw, is why the Qur'an is obsessed with bodily resurrection, because the idea of 'spiritual resurrection' rejects the central soteriological mechanism of the early Qur'an, a transformation of the body into Adamic perfection, worthy to enter eternal paradise.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1061 - September 16, 2016, 08:31 PM
    Quote from: moi on September 16, 2016, 07:40 PM
    That ancient 11000 year old town in turkey is fascinating genetically because children are not related to adults in households!

    And remember the converse, women having several male partners.

    This whole area is extremely poorly researched, and overladen with assumptions.

    Wasn't a key reason for ascetism belief in the second coming?


    Please, please give more information About that 11000 yr old town.  It is sooooo interesting!

    The answer to the ascetism belief is yes?  It was all about the second coming,  those early christians thought Jesus would be coming back in their life time.  The rise of the medievel convents and monastries were due to plague.  The Shaker cult in America died out.  They did not adopt enough orphans or get enough new members.  Some type of cyclic response to environmental pressures like lemmings.  I hope not.
    The unreligion, only one calorie
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1062 - September 16, 2016, 10:44 PM
    On Jewish polygamy, to Zeca,

    Yes, apparently the practice was alive amongst Yemeni jews in 20C. But was it in the 7C? I have no idea...
    It might have been reintroduced because of Islam....

    Focus in above discussion was the ascetic Syriac tradition and it being at the source of the ME monogamy amongst Christians (as a compromise of the ideal of no wife). Are we sure about that, since Christian clergy in ME (apart from the monasteries) has always been allowed to marry?

    Wouldn´t the monastic celibacy be rather a tool to skim off population excess like it was in Western Europe for a long time?

    Where the Quran got its inspiration from for allowing polygamy is an important indication to understand its origin, no? I´m surprised unto now, I have not encountered more studies on the topic.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1063 - September 16, 2016, 11:10 PM
    Quote
    Maybe the real question, and the historical oddity, is how monogamy came to be the custom in the Greek and Roman worlds, and as a consequence in Christianity.


    So true the first part... But are we sure monogamy is result of Greek and Roman culture...Plenty of opportunity to deviate from the practice, see Islam.

    What was the custom amongst Gauls and Germanic tribes? Must have influenced Christianity too.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1064 - September 16, 2016, 11:19 PM
    I can't say I know much about Judaism in seventh century Yemen, though what I have seen questioned is whether it was really Rabbinic Judaism at the time (bearing in mind that Rabbinic Judaism was taking shape in the same period as early Christianity and the continued existence of non-Rabbinic forms is conceivable). I don't see any reason to think polygamy wasn't practiced but I'll see if I can find out any more.
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1065 - September 16, 2016, 11:26 PM
    It´s not only Yemen. Quran has seemed to have  originated in Syria, so the question too is who was practicing polygamy there at the time, and that will give us extra info about the author (s) of the Quran.
    Is it likely that Christians were polygamous there at the time, were the Jews polygamous there? Or the Arabs whatever religion they had... (after reading all I have, I still dont know who the arabs were...  wacko)
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1066 - September 16, 2016, 11:44 PM
    I'm coming round to the view that pre-Islam there were various peoples speaking Arabic or Arabic-like dialects but there isn't really evidence that they called themselves Arabs or would have seen themselves as sharing a common identity. After all we wouldn't normally lump together all the Aramaic speaking communities and religious groups of late antiquity as some kind of 'Aramean' ethnic group with a shared identity. Equally I think talking in terms of a shared Arab identity at the time may just be projecting back from a later period, in part because this is what later Islamic writers did themselves.
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1067 - September 16, 2016, 11:53 PM
    The Tayaye must have come from somewhere and must have been quite numerous to impose their dominance and their culture. Compare with the Germanic invasions in Italy, they imposed their dominance but not so much their culture.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1068 - September 17, 2016, 12:21 AM
    One question that could be asked is what proportion of the people fighting on each side were Arabic speakers. The proto-Islamic movement (for want of a better term) seems to have been fully in control of South Arabia before it started on the Roman and Persian empires, so I think it can be taken as a given that at this point the majority of people under it's rule weren't Arabic speakers (Yemen, then as now, would have accounted for a large part of the population of Arabia). Yemenis then joined and seem to have formed a significant part of the invading forces to the north - presumably most (or all) of them weren't Arabic speakers. Arabic speaking tribes and client states had traditionally provided soldiers for both the Roman and Persian empires and I'm not sure if, or how far, this was still the case at the time of the invasions. Anyway the idea of it being about 'Arabs' fighting 'Romans' and 'Persians' may be a bit simplistic.
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1069 - September 17, 2016, 01:01 AM
    The "proto-islamic" forces: How much was religion (proto-islam) the binding factor at the beginning? Syriac sources  (cfr Penn) seem to indicate that religion was not what identified the new rulers but rather ethnicity. Only later it seems that the new ideology of Islam crystallized with its own distinct rules.
    If it is ethnicity and it was not religion (proto-islam), something must have triggered their invasion of the Roman lands.
    Maybe after being victorious, these proto-islamic forces got a "winners bonus" and other related peoples wanted to join the maelstrom?
    But there must have been a nucleus that started everything, what is that origin? The same place as where Quran was written (Syria?), or distinct from there?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1070 - September 17, 2016, 01:30 AM
    Quote from: zeca on September 17, 2016, 12:21 AM
    One question that could be asked is what proportion of the people fighting on each side were Arabic speakers. The proto-Islamic movement (for want of a better term) seems to have been fully in control of South Arabia before it started on the Roman and Persian empires, so I think it can be taken as a given that at this point the majority of people under it's rule weren't Arabic speakers (Yemen, then as now, would have accounted for a large part of the population of Arabia).

    Further to the east, yes, one can find Mahra who still don't speak Arabic... But in the west, around Sanaa, the Yemenis spoke a language very close to Arabic - Himyaritic (Chaim Rabin, "Ancient West-Arabian"). Those Yemenis would at least have been able to muddle through with the western Arabian trade-tongue.
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1071 - September 17, 2016, 12:59 PM
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

    Huge discussions going on about meanings of stuff there, but I think we need to be asking questions about sexual behaviours of mammals, and possibly the bonobo is important.

    I think archaeology tends to be stuck in hierarchical models and assumes too easily that what it sees is "natural".  It hasn't really grasped complex adaptive systems, or concepts of commons, or that you do not actually need hierarchies to build very complex societies.

    On ascetism, that sounds identical to the cathars!

    Sounds like questions about what is a good life are old :-)
    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"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1072 - September 17, 2016, 11:14 PM
    This is maybe relevant to looking for pre-Islamic 'Arabs':

    Jan Retsö - The concept of ethnicity, nationality and the study of ancient history

    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1073 - September 18, 2016, 10:15 AM
    This article has, in passing, some comments on the use of the term 'tayaye'; as derived from the name of a northern Arabian tribal group, the Tayyi, and generalised in Syriac as a word for 'nomadic Arabs', the equivalent of 'saracens' for the Greeks/Romans.

    Ahmed Al-Jallad and Michael Macdonald - A few notes on the alleged occurrence of the group name ‘Ghassān’ in a Safaitic inscription
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1074 - September 18, 2016, 02:58 PM
    Quote from: zeca on September 17, 2016, 11:14 PM
    This is maybe relevant to looking for pre-Islamic 'Arabs':

    Jan Retsö - The concept of ethnicity, nationality and the study of ancient history




    Islam, Arabic, Arab nations imagined and socially constructed? Blasphemy!!
    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"
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1075 - September 18, 2016, 05:01 PM
    The Jahiliyya - also imagined and socially constructed:

    Peter Webb - Al-Jāhiliyya: Uncertain Times of Uncertain Meanings
    Quote
    “Al-Jāhiliyya” evokes vivid images of idol worship, tribalist antagonisms, and violence commonly assumed to be emblematic of the Muslim representation of pre-Islamic Arabia as a “barbaric” anarchical society. Such associations, however, overlook manifold complexities of the era’s portrayal in classical Arabic literature, and this paper calls for a more nuanced reading of classical narratives of al-Jāhiliyya. Exploration of the word’s semantic shifts evidenced in Arabic lexicography and Qurʾānic exegesis between the third/ninth and seventh/ thirteenth centuries reveals that only after the fourth/tenth century did the now common Jāhiliyya stereotypes become virtually synonymous with pre-Islam. Via a survey of third/ninth century Arabic writings, this paper also explores how and why certain discourses articulated rather positive memories of pre-Islamic times.

    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1076 - September 18, 2016, 08:37 PM
    Arab ethnogenesis - Peter Webb again, very briefly, on how South Arabians became Yemenis

    Peter Webb - Becoming Yemeni



    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1077 - September 18, 2016, 08:53 PM
    Also https://www.islamic-empire.uni-hamburg.de/en/news-and-events/lecture-series/lecture-peter-webb.html
    Quote from: Peter Webb
    'Arabs’ play the role of the protagonist in Islam’s origin stories. Muhammad is called an Arab Prophet, the spread of Muslim rule across the Fertile Crescent is identified as ‘Arab Conquest’ and the Umayyad Caliphate has long been described as an Arab Staatsnation. Such ways in which the label ‘Arab’ is invoked, however, engender broad-brushed generalisations about early Islamic history and the identity of the first Muslims. Islam appears as basically a ‘national movement’ by which ‘Arabs’ brought their Arabian faith system into the wider Middle East, and the elites of early Islam appear as all joint-members of one single, uniform community of ‘Arabs’. Those simplified, monolithic impressions of Arab identity in early Islam clash with the status of contemporary Arabness. Modern Arabs are heterogeneous and impossible to define in tidy categories – so why should we assume that historical Arabs conversely constituted one cohesive ethnic community?

    Was the idea Arab identity at the dawn of Islam contested and fluid? Who exactly called themselves ‘Arabs’ in Islam’s first centuries and what did the word mean? How did consciousness of Arab community interact with the interests of Muslim elites?

    This lecture critically approaches the construct of Arab identity in early Islam. It explores the origins of the word ‘Arab’, its transformation into a term of self-reference, and the different ways in which Arabness was expressed and was marshalled by elites in the dynamic socio-political environments of late Umayyad and early Abbasid-era Iraq.

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  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1078 - September 18, 2016, 09:13 PM
    Peter Webb - The origin of Arabs: Middle Eastern ethnicity and myth-making
    Which side are you on?
  • Qur'anic studies today
     Reply #1079 - September 18, 2016, 09:29 PM
    Quote
    Modern Arabs are heterogeneous and impossible to define in tidy categories – so why should we assume that historical Arabs conversely constituted one cohesive ethnic community?


    The contemporary heterogeneity of contemporary Arabs indeed gives no reason to assume historical Arabs were one cohesive ethnic community, but neither is it evidence of the contrary.
    Since proto-islam seemed to have been a weakly defined ideology in early 7C, there must have been something else binding the conquerers. If it was not ethnicity (let´s not exclude that without evidence, or is there evidence for this position?), what was it?
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