What a find! 2 lines of Arabic poetry - often cited in Abbasid-era belles lettres as being pre-Islamic and 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛 - found north of Mt. Arafat near Mecca. It's dated (!) by the inscriber, Abū Jaʿfar ibn Ḥasan al-Hāshimī, to 98 A.H. (716-17 C.E.). Here's what it says..
1) The turning of Sol effaces the new / afnā l-jadīda taqallub aš-šamsī 2) as does its rising where he passed not the night / wa-ṭulūʿuhā min hayṯu lā tamsī 3) Its rising is white, brilliant and pure / ṭulūʿuhā bayḍāʾu ṣāfiyatun
4) Its setting yellow as Yemeni 𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑠 / ġurūbuhā ṣafrāʾu ka-l-warsī
The word 𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑠 = yellow-dye made from a perennial plant, Memecylon tinctorium, cultivated in Yemen. This line has many attestations (albeit w/ slightly different wordings) in Abbasid literature ...
Here is a variant of the poem cited by in Ibn Abī l-Dunyā’s (d. 894 CE) 𝐾. 𝑎𝑙-𝑍𝑢ℎ𝑑 (Eng. On Asecticism) from the Meccan ḥadīth-scholar Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah from a Coptic/Egyptian Christian who attributes to “a priest (𝑞𝑖𝑠𝑠) of Najrān”
Another citation of the above verses (in variant form) from 𝐾. 𝑎𝑙-𝐻̣𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑤𝑎̄𝑛 (Eng. On Animals) of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869 CE)--he likewise attributes the lines to an unnamed Christian Arab, “the bishop (𝑢𝑠𝑞𝑢𝑓<Gk. ἐπίσκοπος) of Najrān
The earliest attestations are from the 𝐾. 𝑎𝑙-𝑇𝑖̄𝑗𝑎̄𝑛 𝑓𝑖̄ 𝑚𝑢𝑙𝑢̄𝑘 𝐻̣𝑖𝑚𝑦𝑎𝑟 of Ibn Hishām al-Ḥimyarī (d. 833 CE), a work which records lore about the pre-Islamic Yemenite kings. It allegedly contains an early work from the Umayyad period ...
ʿAbīd ibn Sharyah’s dialogue with Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān about the kings of Yemen. It’s not very likely that it's authentic, but Ibn Hishām’s version of the book contains an attestation to the verse, where it’s attributed to Tubbaʿ al-Aqran. BUT ...
Ibn Hishām’s 𝑇𝑖̄𝑗𝑎̄𝑛 also includes a book of the Yemeni scholar Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. 732): K. al-Mulūk al-mutawwajah min Ḥimyar. Wahb’s book attributes the lines to Dhū l-Qarnayn (!), whom he does *not* identify with Alexander the Great, and provides the FULL poem.
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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 ...
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 ...
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...
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!”
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, ...
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…