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https://twitter.com/AB_M_ALBALAWI/status/1304445528751644673

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Mar 4

Epigraphy can be dangerous! A quick tall tale from the Muʿjam al-buldān of Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229) about how an epigraphic discovery in Palmyra led to fall of the Umayyad caliphate…
The story is told by a grandson of Khālid al-Qasrī named Ismāʿīl. He recounts ...

how he accompanied the last Umayyad caliph Marwān II to defeat the rival claimant, Sulaymān ibn Hishām. He says:
“I was with Marwān, the last of the Umayyad tyrants, when he destroyed the walls of Palmyra. They rebelled against him, and he slaughtered them...

He sent the cavalry every which way to trample their corpses; the viscera of their flesh and bones splattered all over the horses’ hooves. He then razed the city walls. The demolition revealed to him a mighty trench. They removed a boulder from it and, lo, they found ...

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Feb 8

A wonderful anecdote from Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s al-Imtāʿ wa-l-muʾānasah:
An agonistic/skeptic (mutaḥayyir) from 10th-century Sijistān was, “What leads you to still hold to the validity of your faith?” And he replies:
“A special quality nothing else has:...

I was born and reared in it. I imbibed its sweetness and grew fond of the customs of its adherents. I’d compare myself to a man who entered a lodge seeking shade from heaven’s brightness for an hour or so of daylight. The lodger brought him to one of its rooms without knowing...

or considering whether it was in good shape. All of a sudden a cloud appeared and a mighty downpour came. The room began to leak. He looked at the other rooms in the lodge but saw they too leaked; he even saw the courtyard of the building turned to muck.
So he decided to stay ...

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Jan 28

In the early 1960s (?) the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad al-Bahī published a small tract called *Missionaries and Orientalists and their Stance towards Islam*. Though a mere 26 pages, it caught the attention of the German journal Die Welt des Islams, which...
archive.org/download/mbmsm…

published a review of it written by a Syrian scholar from Aleppo named Muḥammad Yaḥyā Hāshmī. The tract is interesting because it gives us a ‘pre-Saidian’ criticism of Orientalism from Egypt, and I think that one can encounter some familiar themes.
jstor.org/stable/1569728

Al-Bahī lists the aims of Western colonialism in the MidEast which he believes to be abetted by missionaries and, especially, orientalists. They are: to undermine Pan-Arabism and its cultural + historical bases, to nullify the spiritual values of Islam, to depict the Qur’an as...

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Aug 21, 2023

Q. Naḥl 16:103 famously rebuts the accussation of Quraysh that the prophet Muhammad receives instructions from a man The verse is a good example of how a topos is created by the Qur'an that then generates many spurious stories in the tafsīr/exegetical literature ...

Let’s just look at the stories compiled by al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) to gain a glance how this process unfolds. Basically, all these stories attempt to answer a simple (and entirely extraneous) question: Who was this man who supposedly taught the prophet?

[1] Balaam
Mujāhid←Ibn ʿAbbās:
“The messenger of God ﷺ taught a smith in Mecca who spoke a non-Arabic tongue (or: Aramiac) whose name was Balaam. The polytheists noticed when the messenger of God ﷺ visited him and when he’d leave his home, they said, “Balaam is teaching him!”

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

May 15, 2023

The Qurʾan calls the messenger’s home umm al-qurā|أم القرى (Q. 6:29, 42:7), which some have sought to understand as a calque of the Greek μητρόπολις, “metropolis/mother-city”. But I think this is wrong. Usually, metropolis is translated as umm al-mudun|أم المدن ...

While Umm al-Qurā is an honorific, the Q also indicates that the messenger’s home isn’t the only settlement that could be described by the term: umm al-qurā. Q. 28: 59 states, “Your Lord would destroy villages (al-qurā) until he sent to their mother (fī ummihā) a messenger…”

There’s another parallel, however, called a metrocomia|μητροκωμία, “mother village,” and it appears to me provide a reasonable candidate for the origin of the name umm al-qurā. The idea of a mother village is attested in the Justinian Code and Roman Syria, ...

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Sean W. Anthony

@shahanSean

Apr 29, 2023

Qurʾan refers to “the believers, the Jews, the Christian, and the Sabians (allaḏīn ʾāminū wa’llaḏīna hādū wa’l-naṣārā wa-l-ṣābiʾīn)” (2:62, 5:69; cf. 22:17). Who are these Sabians? Scholars offer many answers, but I think the most interesting one comes from the ḥadīth corpus

It’s often forgotten how frequently Muḥammad’s enemies call him “the Ṣābian” in the sīrah-maghāzī and the ḥadīth literature. The story of ʿUmar’s conversion from Ibn Isḥāq's Maghāzī (d. 767), for instance, depicts ʿUmar referring to Muḥammad as a Ṣābian b4 to his conversion

"'Where are you headed for, ʿUmar?' asked Nuʿaym b. ʿAbdallāh.
'I’m after Muḥammad, this Ṣābiʾan (hāḏā l-ṣābiʾ) who’s caused chaos among Quraysh, sought to make fools of their wisemen, impugned their religion, and insulted their gods! I'll kill him!'"
archive.org/details/Aseera…

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