Social Origins Of Islam: Mind, Economy, Discourse

Notes

introduction 1. For an outline of this argument, see Gates, 11–22; Said (1983), 89–107. 2. See Crone’s Meccan Trade and Sulayman Bashir’s Muqqadimah fi al-Tarikh al-Akher (1984). For a critical assessment of the documents that the revisionist historians rely on, see Ibrahim (1987). 3. Crone, 203–230. 4. Such an attitude is perhaps best exemplified in the following passage by Maxime Rodinson, a rather sympathetic reader of the tradition: “Those who forged the traditions certainly had a true literary gift; they gave their fictions that vivid, easy, familiar quality that makes them so delightful to read—those animated dialogues, those details that seem as though they must have been experienced, those turns of phrase in reported speech, those moments of humour, all seem more redolent of literary talent than of historical authenticity” (xi). One could counter this argument by noting that receptiveness to the Islamic message was enhanced to the extent that the media of its transmission could transcend daily life normalcy, at both levels of discourse and manners of behavior. Though historical facts matter, as far as the study of a worldview is concerned so do what protagonists in the story wanted to believe as facts, which are subsequently surrounded with significations, animated structures, poetics, and mythologies. 5. For example, Crone’s account of the story of Ibn Ubay’s opposition to Muhammad in Medina, which is examined in Chapter 7 of this book, does not reveal a 271 Notes contradiction in the sources as she claims. Rather, the seeming contradictions in the story of Ibn Ubay can be seen to highlight the experimental nature of the political employment of religion, as Islam oscillated between practical verdicts implicated in the immediacy of everyday life, on the one hand, and the notion of abstract and general authority already prefigured in the phenomenon of an absentee prophet, as Muhammad was for Medina before his migration, on the other. If anything, the story of Ibn Ubay indeed registers a significant social transformation in the role of a new faith, as it became increasingly implicated in the question of regulatory, instrumental authority. This type of authority was foreign to the meditative orientation of Muhammad and the earliest faithful. 6. Lukàcs, 30–34. 1. the ideology of the horions 1. The Arabs themselves associated the term “Arabia Felix” only with Yemen, unlike the Greeks and Romans, who associated it with the entire Arabian Peninsula. 2. Al-Istakhri, 24. 3. Qur’an 14:37. 4. Imru’ l-Qays (circa a.d. 500–540), of the tribe of Kinda. He was a son of the last king of Kinda—a short-lived order of sovereignty in Najd in the north central Arabian Peninsula that acted to arbitrate between and pacify warring nomadic tribes. Imru’ l-Qays, so the legend goes, was thrown out by his father for his indulgence in poetry. The legend presents him as an irreverent, sensual, highly versatile lover. He was nonetheless to be entrusted with reclaiming his family’s withering kingship. Being deserted by all his former allies, including his own brothers, he resorted in vain to asking the help of Justinian, the emperor of Byzantium. He died on the way back from Constantinople. An illuminating biography is available in Tuetey, Imrulkais of Kinda. A. J. Arberry, in The Seven Odes, handsomely elucidates the life stories of Imru’ l-Qays and six other major pre-Islamic poets. 5. Al-Alusi, vol. 1, 188, 194. 6. Al-Hamawi, vol. 2, 203. 7. See ‘Aqel, 28–29. 8. Al-Hamawi, vol. 4, 1026–1034. 9. Al-Istakhri, 26. 10. Al-Mas‘udi, vol. 2, 64. 11. Some authorities argue that the eastern region of Bahrain (not to be confused with the modern-day island of Bahrain) was the most densely inhabited region in the peninsula. See ‘Ali, vol. 1, 192. The number of suqs held there seems both to partially support this and to account for its intermediary role in global trade, especially after the interruption of the land route passing through Persia in the sixth century a.d. 12. Al-Alusi, vol. 1, 264–270; al-Hamadani, 296. Other sources, such as Marzuqi, Ibn Habib, and Ya‘qubi, offer slightly differing accounts. For a general assessement of this literature, see Simon, 78–91. The varying accounts also leave the impression that 272 • Notes to Chapter 1 not all traders moved with...