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Introduction mIrIAm goldsteIn The individuals and communities that lived in the Arabo-Islamic world speak through their many and diverse literary creations with a variety of voices. Distinguishing among these voices and evaluating their interaction is a challenging and often elusive task. For this reason, students of this interaction have conceived of it in various ways, in terms that reveal their differing perspectives and approaches. Terms like “influence” and “reception” emphasize the agency of the “donor culture”; “appropriation” and “accommodation” emphasize the agency of the “adoptive” group or culture; biological metaphors such as “cross-pollination” and “symbiosis” emphasize mutual aspects of exchange; and terms like “diffusion ” avoid specifying the means of transfer.1 All of these concepts, as well as the phrase “beyond religious borders,” assume the existence of virtual “border lines” that establish the boundaries of identity between communities—their members, their compositions, and their ideas. In his book Border Lines, Daniel Boyarin compares cross-cultural exchange to a border patrolled by customs inspectors, who monitor and selectively control the crossing of merchandise. Boyarin explains how the border space serves as “a crossing point for people and religious practices,” despite the control mechanisms set up by definitions of identity and belonging. He cites an anecdote about a man who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border daily with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Despite assiduous searches by a customs inspector in the dirt being transported, nothing illegal could be unearthed until on the day of the inspector’s retirement it was revealed that the man had spent his life successfully smuggling wheelbarrows. Boyarin’s anecdote is an example of the contrived and even humorous nature of such imposed partitionings . The anecdote further demonstrates that cultural goods crossed borders , and did so in unexpected ways, despite the efforts of customs inspectors or other such guards to create sealed boundaries based on considerations of 2 mIr IA m goldsteIn identity. Indeed, Boyarin goes on to claim that the inspectors themselves in certain cases became prominent and unwitting agents of this interchange.2 Boyarin’s work focuses on the border between Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries of their coexistence, when lines of identity were vague and unclear—and heresiographers were hell-bent on defining them once and for all. In contrast, during the period of Islamic rule, there is little question of who is a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a Zoroastrian, a Manichaean, and so on.3 The borders of group identity, at least between religions, are significantly clearer and for the most part not subject to debate. Yet despite the relatively clear-cut nature of the individual’s religious identity during the Islamic period, the religious identity of ideas and customs remained far from clear. Cultural boundaries were somewhere between semipermeable and nonexistent; for this reason, the analysis of religious borders is yet relevant in analyzing the relationships between religious groups living under Islamic rule. Numerous lines of affinity linked these groups. The religions of the Near East draw on a lengthy and complex common past and, furthermore, communities of a variety of religions dwelled side by side in various periods. This combination of diachronic kinship and synchronic contiguity led to a complex interrelationship, one in which it is quite difficult to identify and describe the interactions between religions, let alone trace the origins of particular institutions, customs, or scholarly approaches. Many of the specific questions raised by Boyarin’s discussion of identity in the early centuries of the Christian era remain relevant in the Islamic milieu. One area of inquiry relates to the nature of the goods transferred and the reformulation of ideas, customs, or institutions as they traveled along and through communal borders. In what ways were boundaries permeable, and in what ways were they impermeable? In what ways did locally or temporally specific factors affect the nature of such interactions? Other questions relate to the individuals involved in the transfer: To what extent was the process of cultural exchange across communal boundaries conscious? That is, to what extent were members of communities aware that such exchange was taking place, and what was their evaluation of that activity? Furthermore, how did individuals involved in these interactions understand or choose to represent their own identity and that of ideas or institutions that originated on the foreign side of the border? Marshall G. S. Hodgson, implicitly responding to such questions of identity, proposed a view of the history of the civilization marked by Islamic rule that effectively removes such...

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