Volume 95, Issue 1

Abstract: This article addresses a prophecy found in vv. 2‒7 of the thirtieth Qurʾānic sūra, known as al-Rūm (“The Romans”). These verses report on the Romans’ ( al-Rūm ) involvement in a conflict against an unnamed enemy and predict its eventual outcome. The passage refers to the conflict between the Byzantines and Sasanians that lasted for about thirty years during the first three decades of the 7th c. (602‒628 CE). These verses are usually considered to be the only Qurʾānic allusion to a historical event that can be confirmed by sources external to the Islamic tradition. In this study I will argue that the prophecy on the Rūm has close parallels with other prophecies on the war that were circulating in the Middle East in the first half of the 7th c. The contextualization and comparison with other 7th c. prophecies will provide us with a better understanding of the Qurʾānic passage.

Abstract: For all those interested in the religious history of the Near and Middle East during Late Antiquity, the advent of Muḥammad in Arabia and the beginnings of Islam are exciting fields of research. The present study tries to put these subjects into perspective within the broad historical and spiritual context of the 6th and 7th centuries. It is based on a sort of syllogism: Muḥammad and his message belong to Jewish, Christian or Judeo-Christian monotheisms (as attested by the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth); Muḥammad’s first messages seem to announce the imminent end of the world (as is evident from many Quranic passages and several very early ḥadīths); so Muḥammad cannot but announce the coming of the Messiah as the Savior of the End of the world. On this last point, the Qurʾān remains curiously silent, but according to a large number of ancient ḥadiths, Muḥammad actually announces the imminent coming of the Messiah and the latter is none other than Jesus. At the same time, for some followers of Muḥammad, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib seems to have been the second Jesus, Christ and Messiah of the apocalyptic times. After the death of Muḥammad and ʿAlī, the non-advent of the end of the world, the ridda wars, the Arab conquests and the establishment of the empire, events evolved into different directions than expected at the beginning.

Abstract: As an element of material culture and popular belief, amulets reflect the religious and cultural identity of their producers and/or wearers. However, they may also testify to centuries-old iconographical (and textual) traditions. To remain effective and to meet the prevailing religious concepts of the time, those ancient amuletic iconographies and textual elements needed to be reinterpreted. This article takes a look into continuities between Sasanian and Islamic amulet culture in Iran, focusing on the technique of binding and sealing forces referred to on many Late Antique and Islamic amulets.

Abstract: Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (d. 430/1038) and Abū Bakr Aḥmad al-Bayhaqī (d. 458/1066) are mostly considered early representatives of Dalā ʾ il al-Nubuwwa literature. As a consequence the genre itself has often been viewed as a subgenre of sīra literature, which bears stylistic, structural and methodological implications, and affects its reputation as popular hagiographic rather than scholarly literature. These implications may be partially valid for Dalā ʾ il al-Nubuwwa works in the time period of Abū Nuʿaym and al-Bayhaqī but not for earlier works that have not been systematically studied so far. In this article, I examine early authorship in Dalā ʾ il al-Nubūwa literature by identifying numerous works that significantly predate Abū Nuʿaym and al-Bayhaqī. I argue that this literature constituted a continuous tradition from the mid-2nd/8th century onward and that it originated in circles of well-respected ḥadīth scholars who upheld their field’s methodological processes of authentication. Around the second half of the 4th/10th century, authorship shifted toward less acclaimed scholars of ḥadīth or other intellectual fields. Along with this shift came stylistic, structural and methodological changes that have led to the common classification of these works as a subgenre of sīra literature.

Abstract: New data from Chinese, Bactrian and archaeological sources on the oasis of Marw are introduced in the long debate on the Persian or Arab nature of the ʿAbbāsid movement. These data provide us with a rough estimate of the maximum feeding power of the oasis of Marw. This feeding power is then taken into account to demonstrate that the Arab soldiers and their families settled there should have consumed between one-third and two-thirds of the food produced in the oasis. The ʿAbbāsid Revolution did not take place in an oasis with two widely divergent communities, a tiny community of powerful Arab warriors versus a vast majority of powerless Persian-speaking peasants, but of communities intermingled all over the oasis in quite equal numbers which had no choice but to cooperate during four generations before the Revolution. If the Revolutionary network before the Revolution seems to have been mainly Arab, the texts clearly describe an ʿAbbāsid army numerically dominated by Persians under Arab command. The existence of a partially mixed society does explain how an Arab network came to muster and to dominate a much more mixed military force, which gave way to a gradual Persian empowerment.

Abstract: Throughout al-Ashraf Barsbāy’s reign as sultan of Mamluk Egypt and Syria (1422‒1438), one of the main performers and representatives of his expanding authority and power was the amir Qurqumās al-Shaʿbānī (d. 1438). Defeated in the power struggle that followed sultan Barsbāy’s death, Qurqumās’ career ended dramatically in his execution by order of the new sultan, al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq (r. 1438‒1453). Whereas this amir’s rich case received substantial attention from the era’s leading Egyptian historiographers, it has so far hardly attracted any interest in modern scholarship. This article aims to remedy this, but not simply in order to pursue some detailed reconstruction of Qurqumās’ life story. It rather wishes to explore this story as a case study towards a better understanding of how extant historiographical narratives that mattered so much to Qurqumās’ contemporaries may be read in analytically more meaningful ways than traditional approaches have so far allowed for. The article therefore proposes and explores a two-tiered ‒ social and cultural ‒ method of reading contemporary historical texts as politically engaged narrative claims to historical truth. It is demonstrated how across a diverse set of narrative texts the high-profile career of the amir Qurqumās al-Shaʿbānī appears as functionally constructed around the messy relational realities of the administration of sultan Barsbāy’s justice and the performance of his warfare in Egypt, Syria, the Ḥijāz and Eastern Anatolia. It is furthermore argued that in the historiographical record of these messy realities Qurqumās’ career is made to appear through the semantics of justice and sovereignty as an agent of the legitimate and truthful political order of the formation of sultan Barsbāy’s state, but only for as long as that state existed.

Summary: A new discovery of a late manuscript of Ibn Ḥawqal in the library of the ʿAllāl al-Fāsī Foundation, in Rabat, sheds light on the manuscript culture of the late 19th century in Morocco, on the dualism of manuscripts and prints of the same text at the same time. Indeed until now, Ibn Ḥawqal’s geographical treatise is known through eight medieval manuscripts that seem to give four versions of the text, although their relations are not clear. However, an unpublished manuscript is kept in Rabat, but it is a recent copy (early 20th century) of Michael De Goeje’s edition of 1873. Surprisingly this copy bears several charateristics of manuscript writing although the copist had a printed text as model.