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Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century.Before and After Muhammadsuggests a new way of thinking about the historical relationship between the scriptural monotheisms, integrating Islam into European and West Asian history. Garth Fowden identifies the whole of the First Millennium--from Augustus and Christ to the formation of a recognizably Islamic worldview by the time of the philosopher Avicenna--as the proper chronological unit of analysis for understanding the emergence and maturation of the three monotheistic faiths across Eurasia. Fowden proposes not just a chronological expansion of late Antiquity but also an eastward shift in the geographical frame to embrace Iran. InBefore and After Muhammad, Fowden looks at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside other important developments in Greek philosophy and Roman law, to reveal how the First Millennium was bound together by diverse exegetical traditions that nurtured communities and often stimulated each other.

This is an analysis of the powerful Islamic religious movement, initiated by Ibn Tūmart among the Berber tribesmen of North Africa, which culminated in the creation of the huge Almohad empire in the twelfth century. Professor Le Tourneau presents his reflections on the place of the movement in history as well as on its influence in present-day Africa. His principal aim is to elucidate how the Almohads managed to unite all of North Africa and Spain in one empire, and why they ultimately failed to hold their empire together. He also shows that some of the essential factors in Almohad society are still influential in Africa today and that the Almohad experience can aid contemporary promoters of North African unity and prevent them from repeating the mistakes of the twelfth-century rulers.Originally published in 1969.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Creating Christian Granadaprovides a richly detailed examination of a critical and transitional episode in Spain's march to global empire. The city of Granada-Islam's final bastion on the Iberian peninsula-surrendered to the control of Spain's \"Catholic Monarchs\" Isabella and Ferdinand on January 2, 1492. Over the following century, Spanish state and Church officials, along with tens of thousands of Christian immigrant settlers, transformed the formerly Muslim city into a Christian one. With constant attention to situating the Granada case in the broader comparative contexts of the medieval reconquista tradition on the one hand and sixteenth-century Spanish imperialism in the Americas on the other, Coleman carefully charts the changes in the conquered city's social, political, religious, and physical landscapes. In the process, he sheds light on the local factors contributing to the emergence of tensions between the conquerors and Granada's formerly Muslim, \"native\" morisco community in the decades leading up to the crown-mandated expulsion of most of the city's moriscos in 1569-1570. Despite the failure to assimilate the moriscos, Granada's status as a frontier Christian community under construction fostered among much of the immigrant community innovative religious reform ideas and programs that shaped in direct ways a variety of church-wide reform movements in the era of the ecumenical Council of Trent (1545-1563). Coleman concludes that the process by which reforms of largely Granadan origin contributed significantly to transformations in the Church as a whole forces a reconsideration of traditional \"top-down\" conceptions of sixteenth-century Catholic reform.

The oldest Islamic biography of Muhammad, written in the mid-eighth century, relates that the prophet died at Medina in 632, while earlier and more numerous Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, and even Islamic sources indicate that Muhammad survived to lead the conquest of Palestine, beginning in 634-35. Although this discrepancy has been known for several decades, Stephen J. Shoemaker here writes the first systematic study of the various traditions. Using methods and perspectives borrowed from biblical studies, Shoemaker concludes that these reports of Muhammad's leadership during the Palestinian invasion likely preserve an early Islamic tradition that was later revised to meet the needs of a changing Islamic self-identity. Muhammad and his followers appear to have expected the world to end in the immediate future, perhaps even in their own lifetimes, Shoemaker contends. When the eschatological Hour failed to arrive on schedule and continued to be deferred to an ever more distant point, the meaning of Muhammad's message and the faith that he established needed to be fundamentally rethought by his early followers. The larger purpose ofThe Death of a Prophetexceeds the mere possibility of adjusting the date of Muhammad's death by a few years; far more important to Shoemaker are questions about the manner in which Islamic origins should be studied. The difference in the early sources affords an important opening through which to explore the nature of primitive Islam more broadly. Arguing for greater methodological unity between the study of Christian and Islamic origins, Shoemaker emphasizes the potential value of non-Islamic sources for reconstructing the history of formative Islam.

This article examines the motives of the earliest Muslim attacks on the Byzantine Empire in the seventh and eighth centuries by examining the earliest Christian (Byzantine) and Muslim sources that describe these attacks. The article assesses the strengths of these accounts and culls from them the possible religious motivations behind the first Muslim attacks on the Byzantine Empire. One question particularly addressed is the goal of the Muslim attacks: to bring down the Byzantine Empire entirely, or merely to wrest from it Palestine and the surrounding territories that were of significance to the Muslim invaders. In either case, Whealey argues that the motives were religious in nature.

Focusing on the Ming (1368-1644) and (especially) the Qing (1364-1912) eras, this book analyzes crucial moments in the formation of cultural, regional, and religious identities. The contributors examine the role of the state in a variety of environments on China's \"peripheries,\" paying attention to shifts in law, trade, social stratification, and cultural dialogue. They find that local communities were critical participants in the shaping of their own identities and consciousness as well as the character and behavior of the state. At certain times the state was institutionally definitive, but it could also be symbolic and contingent. They demonstrate how the imperial discourse is many-faceted, rather than a monolithic agent of cultural assimilation.

The military conquest of a hostile territory and its population is a paradigmatic form of violence and leaves deep imprints on the memories of the conquerors and the vanquished alike. Examining these imprints and the ways in which they are manipulated by later narrators in specific historical cases can bring to light the multiple functions that memories of violent conquest can serve. An interesting case study is provided by the Muslim conquest of the Iranian city of Tustar. Towards the end of a short seventh-century Nestorian work known as the Khūzistān Chronicle, we find as something of an appendix an account of the Arab conquest of the region and of Shūsh and Shūstrā, or as Arabs came to know the towns, al-Sūs and Tustar. The Chronicle was completed, at the latest, by 680 and is widely recognised as providing a rare window into events, because of its detailed reporting and proximity. It notes that ‘at the time of which we have been speaking, when the Ṭayyāyē’ – that is, the Arabs – ‘conquered all the territory of the Persians and Byzantines, they also entered and overran Bēt Hūzāyē, conquering all the strong towns’. There remained only Sūs and Tustar, which were extremely well fortified, controlled by the Persian forces commanded by Yazdagird (r. 632–51) and one of his commanders, called ‘Hormīzdān the Mede’. The Chronicle tells us that the Arabs were led by Abū Mūsā, who built Basra to settle the Arabs, just as Sad, son of [Abū] Waqqāṣ, had built Kufa. There is reporting on the first conflicts between al-Hurmuzān and Abū Mūsā, al-Hurmuzān's breaking of a truce, his killing of the men who had served as ambassadors between him and the Arabs and the bloody defeat of al-Sūs. Then we learn that the Arabs besieged Tustar, fighting for two years to take it. Finally, a man from the province of Bēt Qaṭrāyē, who lived in Tustar, befriended a man who had a house on the walls of the city, and the two of them conspired together and went out to the Arabs, promising them: ‘If you give us a third of the spoils of the city, we will let you into it.’

This chapter contains sections titled: Sefer Zerubbabel Sefer Eliyyahu Eschatology in a Christian Empire The Apocalypse of Pseudo‐Methodius The Impact of Pseudo‐Methodius and Jewish Apocalyptic Responses to the Muslim Conquest

There can be no doubt as to the momentous nature of the Arab conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries. A vast territory stretching from Central Asia in the east to the Iberian peninsula in the west came under the dominion of the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphs. The Arabian peninsula was largely under the control of the Prophet Muhammad before his death in 632, and virtually all of the Byzantine territories of Greater Syria and Egypt were captured by the early 640s. Arab armies went on to besiege the capital of Constantinople for the first time between 674 and 680. The battle of Qadisiyya (635 or 637) marked the beginning of the campaigns against the Sasanian state; by 651 the last shah, Yazdigerd III, was dead and his empire was consigned to history. The conquests continued west into North Africa, with a Muslim expeditionary force led by ‘Uqba ibn Nafi’ which reached the Atlantic Ocean in 680 and with the fall of the key port of Carthage to the Arabs in 697. In 711 an army of Arabs and Berbers crossed the straits of Gibraltar and, later that year, inflicted a decisive defeat over the forces of the Visigothic king, Roderick. To the east the expansion continued into Central Asia, the city of Samarqand coming under Arab control after 710. Not all the campaigns were fought for the acquisition of new land, however; this crucial period of Islamic history was also marked by civil wars (fitna) in 656–61 and 683–92.