Ever since I first came to know of this monumental inscription, I was racking my brains very hard to make sense of it: it is dated to 155 AH, towards the end of the reign of the Abbasid caliph Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr, but it refers to the sovereign as 'the Mahdī, the commander of the believers' (al-mahdī amīr al-muʾminīn). Now al-Mahdī is the regnal title of both al-Manṣūr's predecessor and successor, his brother Abū al-ʿAbbās, better known to posterity as al-Saffāḥ, and his son Muḥammad al-Mahdī. Upon seeing it in the Museum of Turkish and Islamic

A couple of weeks ago I had a paper (here: academia.edu/37567967) come out on monetary reform during the reign of the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya (r. 661-80 CE), here is a short thread on the implications of my findings in that paper. Scholars had long debated whether Muʿāwiya had issued a new type of gold coin based on the Byzantine solidus as prototype, but which lacked the image of the cross. This is indeed what the so-called Maronite Chronicle famously states: ‘Muʿāwiya minted gold and silver, but it was not accepted because it had no cross on it’, and

A rather important find, a 'new' milestone from the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Saffāḥ. Here are my reading and translation of it, with some brief observations: هذا ما أمر به ا
لمهدي عبد الله
عبد الله أمير ا
لمؤمنين على يدي
يقطين بن موسى
هذا على إثني
عشر ميلا من بريد
أسود العسارى‍

Political rivalry and propaganda in early Islam, a thread:

Last week I ran across this interesting quote by French semiotician Roland Barthes, which biblical scholar Elizabeth Clark has appropriated to describe the modus operandi in early Christian biblical exegesis: ‘what has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it’. Why? Because it’s not so easy to remove a passage that causes theological headaches from the scripture, but it can be explained away using allegorical exegesis. A similar tendency can be observed in Islamic tradition: there are

I'm supposed to be on holiday, but somehow ended up in a vault full of books in the Austrian Academy of Sciences (long story!), where I ran across a copy of Mark Sykes's (of Sykes-Picot fame) memoirs of travels in Asia Minor, prefaced by then-Thomas A. Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, Edward Browne. Two things attracted my attention, the first the manner in which Sykes expresses gratitude to Browne in the acknowledgements: 'for his inspiring instruction in Eastern custom and mode of thought'. The second the condescending manner in which Browne

Did Muhammad really die after the onset of the Muslim conquest of the Near East? Part 2. After posting Part 1 of this series of threads, I began to doubt whether this is the appropriate medium for such a discussion given the depth, complexity, and number of the issues involved. I have, for the time being, decided to go ahead with discussing the sources one by one, over the course of the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. In response to the previous thread, @ProfessorGeorgy asked me if there was a political side to the depiction of Muhammad as

Did Muhammad really die after the onset of the Muslim conquest of the Near East? This four-decade-old question in the study of early Islamic history has found new urgency after the publication of a new monograph dedicated to this topic. Since posting the announcement for my talk next month on the subject I’m being asked if the lecture will be recorded (the answer to which is no, unfortunately we can’t afford such luxuries). I’ve written a rather detailed paper on this subject which is currently under review. But for those interested, I want to do a

The study of Islamic apocalypticism is, really, truly, in its infancy. One quite commonly runs across glib references to ‘apocalyptic fantasies’ to justify tenuous readings by scholars of Islam, as if there is no inherent logic to apocalyptic texts, beliefs, and tendencies. In other words, for most scholars of Islam, who are generally unfamiliar with the theoretical work on the subject by scholars of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, ‘apocalypticism’ is some kind of deus ex machina to ‘make sense’ of seemingly unintelligible texts. A particularly