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Late Antiquity and the Religious Milieu of the Qurâanâs Origins
Sidney H. Griffith
DOI: 10.4324/9781315885360-2
The historiographical concept of Late Antiquity, which first came into scholarly prominence in the work of twentieth-century scholars of the history and culture of the late Roman Empire and of early Christianity in particular, has more recently come to serve historians of early Islam as well by providing a wider hermeneutical horizon within which, more broadly than heretofore, to appreciate the cultural richness of the Arabic-speaking world of the Qurâanâs first appearance. In other words, historians have extended Late Antiquityâs conceptual reach to include the origins and development of early Islam up to the mid-eighth century and even beyond.1 While not neglecting the evidence of the centuries-long Islamic tradition of exploring the Arabian roots of the Qurâanâs language and religious culture, Late Antiquityâs hermeneutical frame of reference has provided researchers with the opportunity especially to explore early Islamâs reflection of its interaction with a much wider interreligious culture than just that of its most immediate Arabian antecedents,2 which some recent scholars have nevertheless continued to emphasize by way of a corrective vision.3 But still the wider range of the Late Antique interpretive horizon has encouraged Qurâan scholars to redouble their efforts to search out connections between the religious discourse of the Arabic scripture and the religious lore and literatures of the non-Arabic-speaking, circumambient communities ranging from the borders of the Roman Empire to those of Iran and the Persian Empire, all of them now considered to have been within the intellectual and cultural purview of the Arabic-speaking community of the Qurâanâs origins.
Within the Late Antique horizon, perhaps the most immediate interreligious background to seriously consider for the study of the Qurâanâs origins is the varied panorama of the presence of Jewish, Christian, and indigenous, polytheist, and monotheist confessional communities revealed by the more recent florescence of scholarship in South Arabian epigraphy, with its disclosure of the regionâs multiple interactions with Ethiopia, the Persian Empire, and the Roman Empire from the third century ce to the seventh.4 The archive of literally thousands of inscriptions and graffiti in the several languages and scripts of pre-Islamic Arabia, from Yemen to the កijÄz and beyond display not only a wide range of Arabian political and military interaction with countries and communities all around its periphery in Late Antiquity, but they also furnish the evidence for sketching the broader outlines of inner-Arabian tribal and political history of the time, along with the concomitant developments in religious thought and allegiance among them. The study of the inscriptions in the ensemble has shown the widespread presence of Jewish and Christian communities among the Arabs by the end of the sixth century ce, along with some evidence of their connections with their coreligionists beyond the Arabic-speaking milieu.5 Most notable, however, is the corroboratory evidence the inscriptions provide for the appearance of an indigenous, one might even say a nondenominational monotheism among the pre-Islamic Arabians, neither Jewish nor Christian as such, but most likely influenced by Jewish or Christian lore, given its trademark veneration of the biblical patriarch Abraham.6 A number of historians have long proposed as much on the basis of passages in the works of largely Greek- and Syriac-speaking writers living outside Arabia proper but who chronicled the interactions of Roman, Persian, and Ethiopian interventions in Arabia in the Late Antique period.7 Of course, numerous Arabic-speaking authors in early Islamic times, such as HishÄm ibn al-KalbÄ« (d. 819), especially in his well-known Book of Idols (KitÄb al-AáčŁnÄm), also reported numerous, mostly polytheist religious traditions, which had flourished in the peninsula prior to the rise of Islam.8
The indigenous, Arabian polytheists, whom the Qurâan calls âassociatorsâ (al-mushrikĆ«n), those whom it accuses of associating other beings with the one God, included numerous devotees of various local deities honored throughout the territories of the Arabic-speaking peoples of Late Antiquity.9 The Qurâan reflects much of the religious idiom of pre-Islamic Arabia in its own vocabulary, just as it includes references to typical Arabian cultic rites and practices in the process of delivering its own distinctive message, which in turn echoes themes and modes of religious expression that also reflect the Qurâanâs interaction with the lore of multiple traditions flourishing in the wider world of Late Antiquity.10 Recent scholarship has shown that by the time of the Qurâanâs origins, the indigenous polytheistic traditions were themselves involved in the process of interacting not only with the increasing presence of Jews and Christians in the Arabian milieu, but also with the religio-political traditions of the bordering empires, particularly those of the Persians and Romans.11
By the first third of the seventh century ce, Jewish communities had already become well established in Arabia; they had achieved political significance in Yemen and Himyar by the fourth century ce,12 where the previously mentioned, so-called nondenominational Abrahamic monotheism first appeared, ostensibly under Jewish influence.13 Jews had established themselves in South Arabia, in កimyar, and particularly in Yemen, long prior to the Christian Era, where they were to remain an important cultural presence until well into the twentieth century.14 For a brief period in the sixth century, a Jewish king, YĆ«suf DhĆ« NuwÄs (d. 525), reigned in កimyar,15 during which time he engaged in a military action against the city of NajrÄn that resulted in the tragic deaths of numerous Christians, a circumstance that yielded a rich martyrological tradition in Syriac, thus bringing news of events in deepest Arabia to the notice of the wider Christian world on the Arabian periphery.16 It is significant that during his tenure in office, King YĆ«suf is also said to have been in correspondence with Jewish religious authorities in Tiberias in Palestine,17 indicating that he and his community were not isolated in Arabia from the wider world of Judaism in the sixth century ce, and suggesting a rabbinical consultation on the kingâs part. More to the present purpose, the existence of Jewish communities in Muhammadâs immediate ambience in the កijÄz in the early seventh century is also well attested.18 In particular, it is well-known that there were Jews in the oasis communities of Khaybar as well as in Yathrib (Medina), where they were known by their tribal identities as the BanĆ« l-Nad.Ä«r, the BanĆ« QaynuqÄÊż, and the BanĆ« Qurayáșa. During his time in Yathrib/Medina, Muhammad is credited with having composed the document that has come to be known as the Constitution of Medina, in which he details regulations for the harmonious relationships between the several tribal groupings of Arabs in the city, the Jews prominently included.19
The ubiquitous Christian communities established throughout the Roman and Persian domains on the periphery of the heartlands of Arabia in Late Antiquity had also long been extending both their political and religious influence beyond their own borders into the milieu of the Arabic-speaking peoples.20 Unlike the case of the Jews of Arabia, however, the available evidence for the Christian presence within the ambience of the Qurâanâs origins is more circumstantial in that, apart from a number of rather laconic pre-Islamic inscriptions and graffiti that include Christian symbols such as the cross and occasional confessional formulae,21 evidence for an active Christian presence in the កijÄz, is largely gleaned on the one hand from scattered Greek and Syriac reports of incidents in Arabian church life22 and on the other hand and most importantly from the Qurâan itself. The Qurâanâs evidence for the currency of Christian thought and practice in the immediate milieu of its origins is abundant. In the Meccan suras, much of the Arabic scriptureâs recollection of the biblical and para-biblical lore of the patriarchs and prophets, notably including accounts of Jesus and his mother Mary, are demonstrably congruent with contemporary Christian traditions and particularly those otherwise attested in surviving Syriac texts.23 The same is the case with nonbiblical accounts, such as the Sleepers of Ephesus or the Alexander Legend,24 and even with allusions to intra-Christian doctrinal quarrels, not to mention references to Christian liturgical personnel and community leaders. Suras from the Medinan period of Muáž„ammadâs prophetic career feature the very texts of the Qurâanâs most critical, even polemical interreligious interaction with Christians, whom it now regularly calls al-NaáčŁÄrÄ, i.e., âNazarenes,â adopting this well-known name for those whom others regularly called Christians from Late Antique Syriac and Greek Christian texts.25
There are scholars who take the Qurâanâs evidence of Christians in its milieu to be indicative not of a Christian presence in the កijÄz in the first third of the seventh century ce but as support for their now minority position that the Qurâanâs origins in its canonical form are not in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century but further north in Syria and Iraq in later Umayyad times, where the Christian presence was still pervasive in the eighth century, especially in its Syriac expression and in its several denominational communities.26 Their hypotheses seem increasingly untenable especially in the light of ongoing research into the age of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Qurâanâs text, which scholars have determined to have been copied in a distinctively កijÄzÄ« script in the second half of the seventh century.27 What is more, scholars who originally made the strongest case for the Qurâanâs origins outside of the កijÄz and well after the close of the seventh century have effectively abandoned their position in the light of subsequent research.28
There has been much scholarly discussion of the Christian identity of the Qurâanâs âNazarenesâ who were present in the Arabian milieu of the Arabic scriptureâs origins, whose doctrines and practices the Qurâan strongly critiques at the same time as it enlists them among the âScripture Peopleâ (ahl al-kitÄb) and âGospel Peopleâ (ahl al-injÄ«l) within its purview. The available historical evidence supports the view that in the Arabic-speaking world of the sixth and seventh centuries ce, the local Christians, the Qurâanâs Nazarenes, were among the largely Syriac influenced âMelkite,â âJacobite, and âNestorianâ communities who composed Late Antiquityâs major Christian denominations in the Middle Eas...
