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...

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...

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

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?

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…”

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

Jerusalem’s sanctity in Muslim belief is well known, and most famously expounded in a genre called ‘The Merits of Jerusalem (faḍāʾil bayt al-maqdis)’. But most collections of these traditions date after the 11th century AD. Are these traditions therefore late? Definitely not … The 1st exegete of the Qurʾan whose work survives is Muqātil ibn Sulaymān al-Balkhī (d. 150/765, Baṣrah). His tafsīr preserves an extensive early list of Jerusalem’s merits (faḍāʾil) in an excursus on Q. Isrāʾ 17:1. Muqātil was active in Iraq, but ...

In ca. 703-4, the Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf completed a project to (re)codify the Qurʾan, refining the codex of the caliph ʿUthmān. What was the project, and what did it entail?
The question is difficult to answer... One of the most comprehensive attempts to piece together what the Arabic accounts have to about the project was pursued by the like of Omar Hamdan and Nicolai Sinai.
academia.edu/9381601/The_se…
jstor.org/stable/24692711

🧵A 9th-cent. historian of Mecca, Abū l-Walīd al-Azraqī, transmits several stories abt how the Prophet Muḥammad spared an icon (ṣūrah) of Mary and Jesus from destruction when he purged the Kaʿbah of the idols it contained. But if the icon wasn’t destroyed, what happened to it? An early Meccan scholar, ʿAṭāʾ ibn Abī Rabāḥ (c. 27–115/ 648–733), claimed to have seen it with his own own eyes. He was asked, “Did you see figural depictions (tamāthīl) in the Kaʿbah?” “Yes,” he said, “I saw the figures of Mary and her son Jesus in her lap finely adorned...

TIL that the Dome of Rock used to contained “a black paving-stone (بلاطة سوداء)” where Muslims used to pray and which, according to the geography Ibn al-Faqīh (fl. 900), had inscribed on it a depiction|خلقة of the prophet Muḥammad. In ca. 780, the caliph al-Mahdī ordered the extension of a stone bench next to it (text below from Ibn al-Murajjā), so it may have been part of the original construction of ʿAbd al-Malik.

Some captivating miniatures depicting biblical prophets from the beautifully illustrated Rabbula Gospels (6th cent.)
➀ Moses (L) and Aaron (R)
➁ Samuel (L) and Joshua bar Nun (R)
➂ Solomon (L) and King David (R) There's plenty more to be seen here: teca.bmlonline.it/ImageViewer/se…

Class consciousness Umayyad style (from 𝑎𝑙-𝐵𝑎𝑠̣𝑎̄ʾ𝑖𝑟 𝑤𝑎-𝑙-𝑑ℎ𝑎𝑘ℎ𝑎̄ʾ𝑖𝑟 of of Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdi, d. 1023):
Muʿāwiyah said to Ṣaʿṣaʿah ibn Sūḥān, ‘Describe humanity to me.’
He replied, ... ‘God created people according to classes: one group to worship, one to rule, one to attain knowledge and study law, one for valor and bravery, and another for trades and professions. Besides that the rest merely muddy the water and drive up inflation.’
archive.org/details/bsaer0…

Someone recently asked me about my thoughts on this "Mary, sister of Aaron" topic, and I warned him that they're pretty pedantic, so here it goes ...

https://twitter.com/provingislam/status/1491876550425387010?s=20&t=_v9Y2iwug_iIXKaOjc7DQA

I suspect that the comments refers to this old thread. My point there was NOT that the Qurʾan *definitely* thinks that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the sister of Aaron, but rather that the idea that it’s an error was never seriously ...

https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1161730325397028866?s=20&t=_v9Y2iwug_iIXKaOjc7DQA

Some instances citations of Q. 112 from the Umayyad period below ...

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1484498586515746816

P.Berol. 12825 (CPR III, no. 43), ca. 705-708

Reports like these make me think that there’s a tendency to grossly underestimate of the multilingualism in the Ḥijāz.
In this report, the Prophet Muḥammad says to the young scribe Zayd ibn Thābit, “There are letters [kutub|كتب] coming to me, which ... I do not wish for everyone to read. Are you able to learn Syriac – or: Hebrew – writing?”
“Yes,” I said, and I learned it in 17 nights.
google.com/books/edition/…

The Muslim scholar Abū Jaʿfar al-Idrīsī (1173-1251) wrote a wonderful book about the pyramids and Egyptian lore that I’ve always thought abt translating to dispel this type of trash (but it really shouldn't take all that). And @LibraryArabLit has already published a wonderful...

https://twitter.com/isisnaucratis/status/1469771277120516107

ʿAbd al-Laṭif al-Baghdadī that can legitimately be called a medieval work of Egyptology written for the Abbasid caliph in 1204. It's one of those rare medieval books that make for a truly great read.
google.com/books/edition/…

Precious photos of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus taken in 1862 by the famous landscape photographer Francis Bedford (1815-1894), some 3 decades before the a devastating fire nearly destroyed it in 1893, digitized and made available courtesy of @RCT
rct.uk/collection/sea… There's a lot more at the website, including the dashing portraits of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (1808-83) below, for the exhibit, "Cairo to Constantinople," here: rct.uk/collection/the…

It's said that the Umayyads’ governor of Iraq, al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, denied that al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī was the Prophet’s progeny because he only recognized patrilineal lineage and discounted matrilineal descent. When in public al-Ḥajjāj thus declared, “Ḥusayn is not... the progeny of the Prophet,” the renowned scholar of the Qurʾan, Yaḥyā ibn Yaʿmur, protest, “O emir, you lie!”
Irate, al-Ḥajjāj turned to him and said, “Then bring forth a proof of what you say from God’s Scripture, or else I shall kill you.” Yaḥyā replied, ...

It's been a while since I've written a 🧵, but someone recently asked me whether or not there is a connection between the famous ḥadīth about the prostration of the sun in the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī and a passage in the Alexander Legend. Here’s my attempt at a cogent answer … First, let’s look at the ḥadīth. Abū Ḏarr al-Ġifārī reports that he was at the mosque with the prophet at sundown, and unprompted the prophet asked,
“Abū Ḏarr, do you know where the sun sets?” “God and his messenger know best,” he replied. He answered, ...

An attempt to define the word millah/religion by the philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 951) from his Kitāb al-Millah,
"Religion is comprised of creeds and deeds determined and bounded by certain conditions which the founder prescribes for the collective. By seeking ... to have [the collective] put [the creeds and deeds] into practice, he aims to attain his specified goal for them or through them. The collective might be a kin group, it might be a city or region, and it might a great nation or many nations."
Later on, he addresses ...

Nice visualization of the different colors attested for the kiswah of the Kaaba over time.

https://twitter.com/abinbaddal1/status/1406310214694064130

What the kiswah actually looked like in the early days is uncertain. Here’s a few interesting traditions from the Muṣannaf of Ibn Abī Shaybah (d. 235/849)
[1] “Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq reported from an elderly woman from Mecca that she said, 'When [ʿUthmān] Ibn ʿAffān was killed,...