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Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam

Book by Sean Anthony · 5 quotes · History Of Religion, History, History Quotes

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Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam Quotes

“In an important article, Angelika Neuwirth eloquently described the shortcomings of our field's insularity as a failure to situate the Qur'an in the "thought world" and "epistemic space" of Late Antiquity - a failure she diagnoses as rooted in the subconscious, but nonetheless persistent, tendency of modern scholarship to reproduce the premodern view of early Islamic history as momentous yet "foreign" and somehow outside and beyond the forces exerted by Late Antiquity on Western and European history.”

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“When Enlightenment thinkers naturalized Muhammad as a mere man rather than a demonic false prophet, they forged a humanistic intellectual environment that inexorably led to the naturalization of Moses and Jesus as men of history and of their times as well. Hence, the three founders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suddenly came to stand on par with one another in the humanists' imaginary, a parity and equilibrium that established the foundations of the very enterprise of the comparative study of religions.”

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“Several themes that are common in early non Muslim sources but far less so in sources from the Arabo-Islamic tradition feature prominently in al-Zuhrī’s account. For instance, al-Zuhrī portrays the ascendance of Muhammad’s followers: (1) as led by a new king (malik), or else as ushering in an era of new kingship/dominion (mulk); and (2) as primarily an ethnic dominion, being a rule not of a community of faithful believers (al-muʾminīn) but rather of “the circumcised people [al-khitān].” While this is not incompatible per se with early Islamic historiography, these themes deeply resonate with early Christian accounts of the rise of Islam, particularly in the Levant, which most often speak of the new Arab/Saracen rulers in terms a new dominion (Syr. malkūtā), not a new religion and hence just as often depict Muhammad and other early Muslim rulers as merely “kings” (Syr. malkē) and nothing more. The account of Ps.-Fredegar fits this pattern perfectly, inasmuch as it describes the “circumcised” conquerors in purely ethnic terms, designating them as either Hagarenes (Agarrini) or Saracens (Saracini), but displays no knowledge of Muhammad, his religion, or the religious convictions and motivations of the “Saracen” conquerors.”

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“The geography of faith had begun to shift profoundly with Islam—a religion that brought with it a renewed, robust vision of an empire of faith. It would also then fall to al-Zuhrī to be the new empire’s most eloquent and skillful articulator of its Islamic vision of the translatio imperii with the prophetic authority of Muhammad and his community at its center—reaffirming that with new faith came new dominion.”

History Of Religion
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