Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamic World

In the dozen years this blog has now been active, it has been an especial joy to watch increased scholarly attention to the Syriac tradition, not a few of whose books have been featured on here. 

Set for release early next month will be another welcome volume aiding in our understanding of this tradition and its wider relations: Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World: Abdisho of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition by Salam Rassi (Oxford University Press, April 2022), 400pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World is the first monograph-length study and intellectual biography of Abdisho of Nisibis (d. 1318), bishop and polymath of the Church of the East. Focusing on his works of apologetic theology, it examines the intellectual strategies he employs to justify Christianity against Muslim (and to a lesser extent Jewish) criticisms. Better known to scholars of Syriac literature as a poet, jurist, and cataloguer, Abdisho wrote a considerable number of works in the Arabic language, many of which have only recently come to light. He flourished at a time when Syriac Christian writers were becoming increasingly indebted to Islamic models of intellectual production. Yet many of his writings were composed during mounting religious tensions following the official conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam in 1295. In the midst of these challenges, Abdisho negotiates a centuries-long tradition of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to remind his readers of the verity of the Christian faith. His engagement with this tradition reveals how anti-Muslim apologetics had long shaped the articulation of Christian identity in the Middle East since the emergence of Islam. Through a selective process of encyclopaedism and systematisation, Abdisho navigates a vast corpus of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to create a synthesis and theological canon that remains authoritative to this day.

Arabic Christianity: Between the Ottomans and Europeans

The historical experiences of, and current realities lived by, Arabic Christians continue to fascinate me. Happily a new book further unfolds this world for us: Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern Europe, being the third volume in the series Arabic Christianity, eds. Ioana Feodorov, Bernard Heyberger, and Samuel Noble (Brill, 2021), 384pp. 

About this international scholarly collection, the publisher tells us this:

This volume sheds light on the historical background and political circumstances that encouraged the dialogue between Eastern-European Christians and Arabic-speaking Christians of the Middle East in Ottoman times, as well as the means employed in pursuing this dialogue for several centuries. The ties that connected Eastern European Christianity with Arabic-speaking Christians in the 16th-19th centuries are the focus of this book. Contributors address the Arabic-speaking hierarchs’ and scholars’ connections with patriarchs and rulers of Constantinople, the Romanian Principalities, Kyiv, and the Tsardom of Moscow, the circulation of literature, models, iconography, and knowhow between the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and research dedicated to them by Eastern European scholars. 

People of the Book

Much romanticized nonsense is talked by both Christians and Muslims about our individual and shared pasts. Too much history traffics in narratives of either "chosen trauma" or "chosen glory," to use the invaluable categories of Vamik Volkan. Too much of the history of Muslim-Christian relations becomes anachronistic and often tendentious as well. The writing of such histories is a case-study in itself of historiographical hazards to be avoided.

We shall have to wait to see if a book, set for September release, avoids these pitfalls or not: People of the Book: Prophet Muhammad's Encounters with Christians by Craig Considine (Hurst, August 2021), 232pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Christians that lived around the Arabian Peninsula during Muhammad's lifetime are shrouded in mystery. Some of the stories of the Prophet's interactions with them are based on legends and myths, while others are more authentic and plausible. But who exactly were these Christians? Why did Muhammad interact with them as he reportedly did? And what lessons can today's Christians and Muslims learn from these encounters?

Scholar Craig Considine, one of the most powerful global voices speaking in admiration of the prophet of Islam, provides answers to these questions. Through a careful study of works by historians and theologians, he highlights an idea central to Muhammad's vision: an inclusive Ummah, or Muslim nation, rooted in citizenship rights, interfaith dialogue, and freedom of conscience, religion and speech. In this unprecedented sociological analysis of one of history's most influential human beings, Considine offers groundbreaking insight that could redefine Christian and Muslim relations.

Christians in Iraq in the 15th Century

If I had lots of time and money, and the requisite languages, I have long wanted to go and spend endless amounts of time immersed in Ottoman and Arab archives discovering new things about Muslim-Christian relations from the eighth century onward. As it is, I'll have to content myself with such books as the recently released Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq by Thomas A. Carlson, (Cambridge UP, 2020), 323pp. 

Christians in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra were socially and culturally home in the Middle East, practicing their distinctive religion despite political instability. This insightful book challenges the normative Eurocentrism of scholarship on Christianity and the Islamic exceptionalism of much Middle Eastern history to reveal the often unexpected ways in which inter-religious interactions were peaceful or violent in this region. The multifaceted communal self-concept of the 'Church of the East' (so-called 'Nestorians') reveals cultural integration, with certain distinctive features. The process of patriarchal succession clearly borrowed ideas from surrounding Christian and Muslim groups, while public rituals and communal history reveal specifically Christian responses to concerns shared with Muslim neighbors. Drawing on sources from various languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Syriac, this book opens new possibilities for understanding the rich, diverse, and fascinating society and culture that existed in Iraq during this time.

We are also given the Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. Coming into focus: the world of fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra
2. Muslim lords and their Christian flocks
3. Living with suspicious neighbors in a violent world
4. Interlude: concepts of communities
5. Bridges and barriers of doctrine
6. Practical theology in a dangerous time
7. Rituals: the texture of belonging
8. Desperate measures: the changing ecclesiastical hierarchy
9. The power of the past: communal history for present needs
Conclusion
Appendix A. Glossary
Appendix B. Lists of rulers and patriarchs
Appendix C. The patriarchal succession of the Church of the East
Appendix D. Dating the ritual for reception of heretics.

Christian Martyrs Under Islam

There is still much to be learned about early Muslim-Christian encounters in the first generations of Islam and its gradual conquest of the Middle East. In the wrong hands, this history can be portrayed tendentiously, as either relentless bloodshed and suffering or impeccable peace and amity. A book released last summer tries to recognize the complexity of decisions facing Christians living under Islam: Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World by Christian C. Sahner (Princeton University Press, 2018), 360pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy.

Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire.

Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

Medieval Middle Eastern Christians

I've followed the work of the relatively young scholar Jack Tannous for some time, and been consistently impressed. So it is with eager anticipation that I look forward to the publication, next week, of his book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press, 2018), 664pp.

Bearing a slew of impressive recommendations, including from the well-known Byzantinist Averil Cameron, this book, the publisher tells us, is

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story.

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.

What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

The Problems of Arabic Historiography of Conquest

Every group, nation, state, culture, or even church or religious group tends to write the history of its founding and of its past with a certain eye on the present and another on the future. As I have often quoted the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, "memories always have a certain future in mind." And very often, too, in the writing of that history those memories are rarely displayed, so far as can be known, in all their messiness. Rather, they are often tidied up into carefully selected narratives of "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory," to use Vamik Volkan's very useful concepts.

All of that is true in spades for the historiography of the rise of Islam, the problems with and in which are notorious and have long bedeviled scholars. Released in December in a paperback version, Boaz Shoshan, The Arabic Historical Tradition and the Early Islamic Conquests: Folklore, Tribal Lore, Holy War (2016, Routledge) reminds us anew of those problems and takes a fresh and necessary look at them.

As the publisher tells us about this book:

The early Arab conquests pose a considerable challenge to modern-day historians. The earliest historical written tradition emerges only after the second half of the eighth century- over one hundred years removed from the events it contends to describe, and was undoubtedly influenced by the motives and interpretations of its authors. Indeed, when speaking or writing about the past, fact was not the only, nor even the prime, concern of Muslims of old.

The Arabic Historic Tradition and the Early Islamic Conquests presents a thorough examination of Arabic narratives on the early Islamic conquests. It uncovers the influence of contemporary ideology, examining recurring fictive motifs and evaluating the reasons behind their use. Folklore and tribal traditions are evident throughout the narratives, which aimed to promote individual, tribal and regional fame through describing military prowess in the battles for the spread of Islam. Common tropes are encountered across the materials, which all serve a central theme; the moral superiority of the Muslims, which destined them to victory in God’s plan.

Offering a key to the state of mind and agenda of early Muslim writers, this critical reading of Arabic texts would be of great interest to students and scholars of early Arabic History and Literature, as well as a general resource for Middle Eastern History.

Arab Nationalism and Political Islam

For complicated but often quite defensible reasons, some Eastern Christians in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere have sometimes been strong proponents of Arab nationalism in the hopes that it might in fact be a pan-nationalism, that is, a political ideology qua political in the modern "secular" sense, making room for Christian and other minorities in the face of an otherwise sometimes hostile Islam.

A new study by Lahouari Addi looks more deeply into Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam (Georgetown UP, 2017), 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In Radical Arab Nationalism and Political Islam, Lahouari Addi attempts to assess the history and political legacy of radical Arab nationalism to show that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. While the revolutionary regimes promised economic and social development and sought the unity of Arab nations, they did not account for social transformations, such as freedom of speech, that would eventually lead to their decline. But while radical Arab nationalism fell apart, authoritarian populism did not disappear. Today it is expressed by political Islam that aims to achieve the kind of social justice radical Arab nationalism once promised.

Addi creatively links the past and present while also raising questions about the future of Arab countries. Is political Islam the heir of radical Arab nationalism? If political Islam succeeds, will it face the same challenges faced by radical Arab nationalism? Will it be able to implement modernity? The future of Arab countries, Addi writes, depends on this crucial issue.

From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt

First released in hardcover in 2014, and then this past May in paperback, Maged Mikhail's From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest joins a series of other recent publications (discussed here and here) examining what happened to Christian populations after the conquest of Islam in the early seventh century.

As with Penn and Hoyland, Mikhail's book begins by noting that when Arab Muslims encountered residents of Egypt, what began in that encounter was not the complete replacement of one culture by another, but the great co-mingling of many ideas and practices. Thus he also issues a correction and caution against seeing the year 641 as some kind of radical break.

He begins by noting important issues with texts and their interpretation. In some ways, there are problems of abundance. In others, as is well known, there are problems of scarcity and unreliability among Arabic texts. With these latter, the biggest problem is the length of the period in which they circulated orally, subject to all manner of revision and emendation. You can only imagine what that does to the reliability of the tales retailed thereby.

But Christian texts are not without their own problems. Focusing on the well-known History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Mikhail notes the textual variants in the two main recensions of that key document for so much of Alexandrian ecclesiastical history.

All this pales, he suggests, in the light of the massive doctrinal controversies that so marred Egypt, the frontline of the fight between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians. Anything and everything has been touched and tarred by this, and the fact that the Coptic Church emerged as a non-Chalcedonian church has been used to explain all kinds of things, no matter how far-fetched. Here a good deal of the influence is still felt by W.H.C. Frend's study from 1972, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement.

It is now exceedingly difficult, Mikhail says, to see which, if any, of the Coptic Christians in Egypt believed in the comical and amateurish notion of "monophysitism" that has come down to us as a belief in a "single divine nature." It was, in other words, a heresy held by nobody. Rather, Coptic Christians were concerned that Chalcedon was suspectible of a "Nestorian" interpretation, and to guard against this they preferred the well-known Cyrillian formula "of two natures" rather than Chalcedon's "in two natures."

As a result of getting this clear, Mikhail says we must now reject the idea that the "monophysites" suffered from an "intrinsic inability to resist Islamic theology." To be sure, the intrusion of Islam did eventually force greater co-operation among the various Christian groups in Egypt, but it was a much longer and messier process than many imagined. And here, too, he also debunks the slanderous nonsense that the Copts, hating their "Byzantine" "overlords" turned around to "welcome" the Islamic invaders. This lie has been debunked again and again, and it comes in for fresh demolition here in a book marked by careful sifting of the evidence (the notes and bibliography run to well over 100pp) and very much worth your time if you have any interest in Coptic, Egyptian, Islamic, Arabic, and doctrinal history.

Robert Hoyland on Arabic Conquests

When we were last met together, we were discussing Michael Philip Penn's two recent and highly valuable books. In those he mentions other scholars who came before him in attempting, however incompletely, to make the Syriac encounters with Islam--by far the earliest such encounters, and the ones with the most numerous and most contemporaneous documentation--better known. One of those pioneering scholars was Robert Hoyland, author of the recent study In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Hoping for a longer review later, I post a few notes here about this important book deserving a place in every library concerned with Islamic history and the history of Muslim-Christian relations.

Hoyland begins by noting an unapologetic preference for 7th- and 8th-century texts, which are of course the earliest such records. What makes this approach innovative, but also, for a time, anathema to other scholars, is that these texts are often thought--disdainfully by some--as being largely "Christian" texts.

But this illustrates the central point he's going to make: there is no clear differentiation, in the earliest generations, between Arab Muslims and Syriac Christians; such a separation would come much later, and not be nearly so clear or so sharp as many today imagine. Other scholars have known for quite some time of the existence of these texts, but have avoided using them, leaving us as a result with virtually nothing--certainly nothing reliable--in the first generations of Islam after the Quran. To overcome this caesura, Hoyland is openly recognizing and using what he terms an "overwhelmingly" large number of texts of Christian provenance in Syriac and other non-Arab languages. For obvious reasons most Islamists before this have avoided using them. He's not just using or championing these texts over Islamic ones: he's arguing that the distinction between them is false and misleading.

Hoyland will also challenge a couple of other commonplaces in this book, including the one that sees the Arab advances in the 630s-640s as staggering and relentless in their success. Not quite so fast, he says, in more ways than one: it is better to see these advances over the longer period of  630-740 and to note during that period that there were some setbacks as the Arabs had to learn and adjust to a world so new to them in many ways.

As they encountered that world, Hoyland documents just how much it was not in fact totally overturned or remade by the Arabs. Neither did they bring in a dramatically new civilization from Western Arabia so much as remake existing ones, drawing on Christian and other elements to cobble together what, thanks to Hoyland, Penn, and contemporary scholars, we now recognize as a real bricolage. 

Arab Views of the Crusades

I taught a course this past summer entitled "ISIS and the Crusades," looking at the uses and abuses of history by ISIS in its talismanic invocations of "the Crusades." The scholarship on those centuries-long highly complex series of events has been expanding for some time now, but that has not touched at all the tendentious invocation of them by terrorists.

We are still in need of further work in Arab and Islamic views of them, and as of September we will have an affordable paperback edition of an important study first published in 2014: Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2016), 360pp.

About this book we are told by the publisher the following:

In 1099, when the first Frankish invaders arrived before the walls of Jerusalem, they had carved out a Christian European presence in the Islamic world that endured for centuries, bolstered by subsequent waves of new crusaders and pilgrims. The story of how this group of warriors, driven by faith, greed, and wanderlust, created new Christian-ruled states in parts of the Middle East is one of the best-known in history. Yet it is offers not even half of the story, for it is based almost exclusively on Western sources and overlooks entirely the perspective of the crusaded. How did medieval Muslims perceive what happened?

In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers a new history of the confrontations between Muslims and Franks we now call the "Crusades," one that emphasizes the diversity of Muslim experiences of the European holy war. There is more to the story than Jerusalem, the Templars, Saladin, and the Assassins. Cobb considers the Arab perspective on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. In the process, he shows that this is not a straightforward story of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land, but a more complicated tale of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage a new threat from the barbarian fringes of their ordered world. When seen from the perspective of medieval Muslims, the Crusades emerge as something altogether different from the high-flying rhetoric of the European chronicles: as a cultural encounter to ponder, a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be seized, and as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad.

An engrossing synthesis of history and scholarship, The Race for Paradise fills a significant historical gap, considering in a new light the events that distinctively shaped Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages.

Arabs and Ottomans

Sam Noble continues the absolutely vital work of making Arab Christian history better known. Fresh off his edited collection with Sasha Treiger (read my interview with them here), Noble has collaborated with Constantin Alexandrovich Panchenko on Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–-1831 (Holy Trinity Publications, 2016), 676pp.

About this book we are told:

Following the so called “Arab Spring” the world’s attention has been drawn to the presence of significant minority religious groups within the predominantly Islamic Middle East. Of these minorities Christians are by far the largest, comprising over 10% of the population in Syria and as much as 40% in Lebanon.The largest single group of Christians are the Arabic-speaking Orthodox. This work fills a major lacuna in the scholarship of wider Christian history and more specifically that of lived religion within the Ottoman empire. The author draws on archaeological evidence and previously unpublished primary sources uncovered in Russian archives and Middle Eastern monastic libraries to present a vivid and compelling account of this vital but little-known spiritual and political culture, situating it within a complex network of relations reaching throughout the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe. The work is made more accessible to a non-specialist reader by the addition of a glossary, whilst the scholar will benefit from a detailed bibliography of both primary and secondary sources.

Muslim-Christian Relations in Ottoman Palestine

I have noted many books over the years about Ottoman history, especially the history of Muslim-Christian relations in the empire. I have also noted the perduring problem of ethno-nationalism as it has afflicted, and still afflicts, not just Eastern Christian groups but Muslim ones as well.

A book set for release later this spring looks at all these questions: Erik Freas, Muslim-Christian Relations in Late-Ottoman Palestine: Where Nationalism and Religion Intersec (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 320pp.

About this book we are told by the publisher:

Numerous factors underlie the dynamic shaping of present-day Muslim-Christian Arab relations as well as the formulation of Arab national identity. In Muslim-Christian Relations in Late-Ottoman Palestine, Erik Freas argues that paramount among these were three developments that transpired in the late-Ottoman period, of which Palestine provides a microcosm. One is that non-Arabic speaking Christian communities began to define identity in nationalistic terms on the basis of faith. Also, with their transformation into politically equal Ottoman citizens, Christians were more intent on taking advantage of their new rights rather than fulfilling civil obligations. Finally, for most Muslim Arabs, the transition from identifying primarily as 'Muslim' to 'Arab' in terms of their broader communal affiliation often entailed little change in how they experienced communal identity in the day-to-day. Taken together, the analysis of these developments provides an in-depth examination of Muslim-Christian Arab relations in Palestine during the nineteenth century as well as the long-term implications of these changes on the manner of Arab national identity's formulation.

The History of Eastern Christian Historical Writing

I'm looking forward to teaching a course next year on the uses and abuses of history, focusing on Christian-Muslim relations and the ever-misunderstood Crusades, which the lovely inhabitants of ISIS keep banging on about in their propaganda. So historiographical questions have come to preoccupy my attention and thinking more and more over the last few months. I am therefore especially interested in this recently released volume in multi-part series: Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 2: 400-1400 (Oxford UP, 2015), 672pp.

The volume has chapters on, inter alia, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syro-Arab, Syriac, Arab, and Byzantine histories. About this book the publisher further tells us:

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400-1400? How was the past understood in religious, social and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes essays on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

Arab Christians in Mandatory Palestine

As I've argued here and elsewhere, many people still today greet the concept of Arab Christians with slack-jawed disbelief: aren't all Arabs Muslims? Or if there ever were Arab Christians, surely they were all wiped out after the seventh century? The answer to both questions is of course No. But that having been said, our knowledge of Arab Christians remains woefully underdeveloped. To the recent collection The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700 - 1700: An Anthology of Sources (whose editors I interviewed here) we can now add a new book by Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917-1948 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 232pp.

About this book we are told:

Recent conflict in the Middle East has caused some observers to ask if Muslims and Christians can ever coexist. History suggests that relations between those two groups are not predetermined, but are the product of particular social and political circumstances. This book examines Muslim-Christian relations during an earlier period of political and social upheaval, and explores the process of establishing new forms of national and religious identification. Palestine's Arab Christian minority actively engaged with the Palestinian nationalist movement throughout the period of British rule (1917-1948). Relations between Muslim and Christian Arabs were sometimes strained, yet in Palestine, as in other parts of the world, communalism became a specific response to political circumstances. While Arab Christians first adopted an Arab nationalist identity, a series of outside pressures - including British policies, the rise of a religious conflict between Jews and Muslims, and an increase in Islamic identification among some Arabs - led Christians to adhere to more politicized religious groupings by the 1940s. Yet despite that shift Christians remained fully nationalist, insisting that they could be both Arab and Christian.

Problems in the Narratives of Arab Conquests

It is something of a commonplace among scholars who study the origins of Islam and its first encounters with Christians that the historical narratives of those conquests are rife with problems--written long after the events in question and in such a triumphalistic and tendentious way as to put sharply into question the reliability of just about anything that is claimed for the Arab "side." A new book revisits these important if controversial questions: Boaz Shoshan, The Arabic Historical Tradition & the Early Islamic Conquests: Folklore, Tribal Lore, Holy War (Routledge, 2015), 206pp.

About this book we are told:

The early Arab conquests pose a considerable challenge to modern-day historians. The earliest historical written tradition emerges only after the second half of the eighth century- over one hundred years removed from the events it contends to describe, and was undoubtedly influenced by the motives and interpretations of its authors. Indeed, when speaking or writing about the past, fact was not the only, nor even the prime, concern of Muslims of old. The Arabic Historic Tradition and the Early Islamic Conquests presents a thorough examination of Arabic narratives on the early Islamic conquests. It uncovers the influence of contemporary ideology, examining recurring fictive motifs and evaluating the reasons behind their use. Folklore and tribal traditions are evident throughout the narratives, which aimed to promote individual, tribal and regional fame through describing military prowess in the battles for the spread of Islam. Common tropes are encountered across the materials, which all serve a central theme; the moral superiority of the Muslims, which destined them to victory in God’s plan. Offering a key to the state of mind and agenda of early Muslim writers, this critical reading of Arabic texts would be of great interest to students and scholars of early Arabic History and Literature, as well as a general resource for Middle Eastern History.