Mention above of Ethiopia. Vaguely remembering tom Holland, what effects might Africa had have on the evolution of Arabic and Islam?
I'm not sure but it was part of the late antique Christian world that Islam developed from. The sixth century Ethiopian invasion of Himyar may well have helped create the context for the earliest development of what would later become Islam. Carlos Segovia argues for this.
See this review of Bowersock's Throne of Adulis for example:
https://cy.revues.org/2818?lang=enBy the sixth century, the imperial tensions that the Adulis Throne embodied had been exacerbated by religious differences. The Aksumite monarchs and the Ḥimyarite kings of south Arabia had converted to Christianity and Judaism respectively (Chapters 5‑7: 63‑105). In the fourth century Aezanas (‘Ezana), Aksum’s first Christian king, erected numerous commemorative inscriptions that perpetuated the rhetoric of Aksumite control over south Arabia. One of them contained texts in Greek, Ge‘ez written in an unvocalized Ethiopic script, and Ge‘ez rendered in a south Arabian Sabaic script (68‑70; figures 3‑4). The sixth‑century Aksumite king named Kālēb thereby inherited an imperial vision and religion that pitted him against the Jewish kings of Ḥimyar. These incited a particularly notable episode in pre‑Islamic Arabian and Red Sea history. Responding to a recent Aksumite expedition, a Jewish king named Yūsuf persecuted the Christians of Ḥimyar and massacred the Christian population of the city of Najrān in 523. Amid this activity, Yūsuf solicited the support of the Sasanian Persians and the Naṣrid dynasty at al‑Ḥira, but by 525 Kālēb had occupied Ḥimyar and had revitalized the Christian presence there. Kālēb also raised victory inscriptions (95 and 98‑101) in Ge‘ez at Aksum and in Ḥimyar to commemorate his two expeditions. The imperial pretensions of the Adulis Throne, raised centuries earlier, had come to fruition, but now in the name of a Christian victory over Judaism.
The Aksumite occupation of Ḥimyar intensified diplomatic confrontation between Rome and Persia in Arabia thereafter (Chapter 8: 106‑19). Despite their doctrinal differences, the Roman emperor Justinian aligned with Aksum with the vain expectation of increasing Rome’s part in the silk trade. The diplomat Nonnosus, whose multilingual family had produced Roman ambassadors to the Red Sea and Arabia for decades prior, played a key role in this (108‑11, with Appendix 135‑43). An Aksumite dynast named Abraha ultimately asserted autonomous authority in Ḥimyar and (in 547) held a summit at Mārib that attracted Roman, Persian, and various Arab ambassadors. He also commemorated this event on an inscribed stele (112‑14). But persisting imperial and religious tensions brought the Persians, at the behest of south Arabian Jews, to intervene in the region in the early 570s. Religious conflicts continued, but no Christian or Jewish political power was left in Arabia to manage them (117‑18).
This contentious, unstable environment provided the context in which Muḥammad founded his religious movement (Chapter 10: 120‑33). Animosities among Jews, Christians, monotheistic pagans, polytheistic pagans (as Bowersock argues), and Muḥammad’s followers in fact eventually culminated in ways that led to Muslim domination of Arabia in the 620s and of the Roman and Sasanian Near East shortly thereafter. Moreover, while once being so avid to intervene in south Arabia through their proxy allies, the mighty Roman and Persian empires virtually destroyed each other through incessant fighting just as Muḥammad’s followers were overwhelming their opponents in Arabia. In this way, Muḥammad’s career ended the era embodied by the Adulis Throne, even as it owed it a great debt.
Shoemaker's review is more critical (first page only viewable unfortunately):
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/546847This brief book offers a lively introduction to the early history of Ethiopia and its relations with South Arabia. In it Bowersock opens up for readers the world of ancient East Africa primarily through the careful exegesis of two inscriptions that once were found on a now lost monument, the throne of Adulis, for which the book is titled. Our knowledge of this ancient structure comes entirely from the famous sixth-century traveler and geographer, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who saw the monument in the city of Adulis on the coast of the Red Sea sometime around 525 c.e. Cosmas had been tasked with making a transcription of these Greek inscriptions for the Ethiopian king in Axum, and apparently he kept a copy for himself, which he then included in his Christian Topography.
Bowersock’s decision to focus on this pair of vanished inscriptions may initially seem a bit odd, particularly since so many other inscriptions from the region do survive. Nevertheless, this is partly explained by the fact that this book was commissioned for a series on emblematic objects or events, but also by the fact that one of the inscriptions in question “is undoubtedly the earliest of all known Axumite royal inscriptions” (45). Moreover, the nature of the object itself, with inscriptions from two different periods and its description during a third period, enables it to serve as an emblem of ancient Ethiopia in three distinct periods: the Hellenistic period, the early Roman Empire, and late antiquity.
Accordingly, the object affords Bowersock an opportunity to survey the history of Ethiopia in antiquity from the Ptolemies to the rise of Islam through the interpretation of its inscriptions and Cosmas’s account. Yet in this respect the book is seemingly a bit mistitled, at least in its subtitle: “Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam.” Only about twenty-five pages at the end of the book concern the wars of the sixth century and the rise of Islam, with the remainder largely focused on earlier events. One imagines that “the Eve of Islam” may have been added to increase sales, and readers interested specifically in the conflicts in South Arabia during the sixth century as a backdrop for the beginnings of Islam should probably look instead to another recent (and even more brief) publication by Bowersock, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity (Brandeis University Press, 2012).
The book begins with a description of the throne itself, at least as reported by Cosmas, who is then himself the focus of the following chapter. The third chapter [End Page 307] focuses on the Hellenistic inscription, which is placed in the broader context of Ptolemy III’s rule and dated between 246–44 b.c.e. This early inscription, it is worth noting, was found not on the throne itself but on a stele that stood immediately behind it. The next chapter considers the throne’s inscription, which Bowersock dates to the late second or early third century. It preserves a record of imperial conquest in East Africa and beyond that Bowersock correlates with other roughly contemporary inscriptions from the region. Bowersock then turns in the subsequent chapters to the topic of Ethiopia’s conversion to Christianity and the intriguing role that Judaism played in the cultures of South Arabia during late antiquity. The final three chapters cover respectively the bloody conflict between Jews and Christians in South Arabia during the early sixth century; the involvement of the Romans and Persians in this regional conflict; and the rise of Islam in the early seventh.
I found least successful those chapters to which the subtitle draws the reader’s focus: the final chapters in which Bowersock attempts to build connections with the beginnings of Islam. Bowersock seems to have more confidence in the accuracy of the early Islamic historical sources than I believe is warranted (see e.g. 159 n.15). Moreover, his criticisms of proposals by Hawting and Crone that the “pagans” of the Qur’an were in fact monotheists who also prayed...
Segovia's review (in Spanish):
http://www.revistadelibros.com/articulos/del-simulacro-al-laberintolos-origenes-del-coranBowersock muestra de manera pormenorizada y convincente que la imagen de la Arabia politeísta descrita en las fuentes islámicas no se sostiene y que, hacia mediados del siglo VI, la confrontación entre el cristianismo impulsado por Axum y Bizancio, por un lado, y el judaísmo respaldado por el reino de Himyar bajo los auspicios del imperio sasánida, por otro, llegó a su cenit, lo que no sólo no impidió, sino que propició una aparente reforma político-religiosa guiada por el deseo de alcanzar una síntesis. Hay, por tanto, que resituar el posterior surgimiento del islam en ese fascinante contexto histórico, al que las hostilidades bizantino-sasánidas imprimieron un nuevo perfil a lo largo del siglo VII y durante el cual las relaciones políticas y culturales de la Península Arábiga con Palestina, Siria, Mesopotamia y el sudoeste de Persia se intensificaron. El nombre de Bowersock se une así al de otros estudiosos cuyos trabajos han contribuido, desde diferentes ángulos y con diferentes resultados, a renovar las coordenadas de la investigación académica sobre los orígenes del islam al margen de la información, mezcla de invención, recuerdo selectivo y olvido –características de toda literatura en la que la consolidación del presente depende de la creación del pasado, como nos recuerda Judith Lieu en otro ámbito– consignada en las fuentes islámicas.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today