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Patricia Crone Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts Islamic History and Civilization Studies and Texts Editorial Board Hinrich Biesterfeldt Sebastian Günther Wadad Kadi VOLUME 114 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ihc Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone Edited by Behnam Sadeghi Asad Q. Ahmed Adam Silverstein Robert Hoyland LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: ‘The Townsman Robs the Villager’s Orchard’ in a Haft awrang (Seven Thrones) by Jami Iran, AH 963-72/1556-65. Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper, 34.5 × 23.4 cm (folio). Washington DC, Freer Gallery of Art, Purchase F1946.12, folio 179v. This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0929-2403 isbn 978-90-04-25201-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28171-4 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Preface ix Patricia Crone: A Brief Memoir xiv Judith Herrin Tabula Gratulatoria xxi Curriculum Vitae of Patricia Crone xxiv List of Contributors xxxii 1 Variant Traditions, Relative Chronology, and the Study of Intra-Quranic Parallels 1 Joseph Witztum 2 The Earliest Attestation of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P. Nessana 77 (60s AH/680 CE) 51 Robert Hoyland, with an Appendix by Hannah Cotton 3 Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins 72 Guy G. Stroumsa 4 A Note on the Relationship between Tafsīr and Common Understanding with Reference to Contracts of Marriage 97 Karen Bauer 5 “Earnest Money” and the Sources of Islamic Law 112 Gerald Hawting and David M. Eisenberg 6 “A Bequest May Not Exceed One-Third”: An Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis and Beyond 133 Pavel Pavlovitch and David S. Powers 7 Basra and Kufa as the Earliest Centers of Islamic Legal Controversy 173 Christopher Melchert 8 God’s Cleric: Al-Fuḍayl b. ʿIyāḍ and the Transition from Caliphal to Prophetic Sunna 195 Deborah G. Tor vi Contents 9 Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn and the Politics of Deference 229 Matthew S. Gordon 10 Eighth-Century Indian Astronomy in the Two Cities of Peace 257 Kevin van Bladel 11 Greek Language and Education under Early Islam 295 Maria Mavroudi 12 Kalām and the Greeks 343 Fritz W. Zimmermann 13 “Arabs” and “Iranians”: The Uses of Ethnicity in the Early Abbasid Period 364 Michael Cooperson 14 The Poetics of Cultural Identity: Al-Mutanabbī among the Būyids 388 Margaret Larkin 15 Must God Tell Us the Truth? A Problem in Ashʿarī Theology 411 Khaled El-Rouayheb 16 Administrators’ Time: The Social Memory of the Early Medieval State, East and West 430 Chris Wickham 17 An Eleventh-Century Justification of the Authority of Twelver Shiite Jurists 468 Devin J. Stewart 18 A Family Story: Ambiguities of Jewish Identity in Medieval Islam 498 David J. Wasserstein 19 What Happened in al-Andalus: Minorities in al-Andalus and in Christian Spain 533 David Abulafia Contents vii 20 The Samaritan Version of the Esther Story 551 Adam Silverstein 21 New Evidence for the Survival of Sexually Libertine Rites among some Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs of the Nineteenth Century 565 Bella Tendler Krieger 22 Crone and the End of Orientalism 597 Chase F. Robinson Index 621 Preface The stature of Patricia Crone in the field of Islamic history is such that many readers will not need a reminder of the importance, range, and originality of her scholarship. Her willingness to question old certainties and the clarity and passion with which she argues for her positions have inspired many younger historians and guaranteed that her works will continue to generate fruitful dis- cussions for decades to come. We will not give an outline of her scholarship here. Her cv, printed in the following pages, does that. Instead, we would like to mention some of her qual- ities as a researcher and educator that we consider exemplary. Most of these qualities, we believe, are related to the fact that she is, above all, a seeker and lover of the truth. Some scholars consider talk of “truth” as naïve. Many intel- lectuals specialize in producing writing that lacks a bottom line and fails to take a position. Yet others believe that historians should not go much beyond describing the evidence. And others freely take nontrivial positions and advo- cate theories, but do so dogmatically, lacking the stomach to see ideas face the test of the evidence. Crone, however, proceeds in a scientific manner:1 she puts forward bold historical claims that go far beyond the evidence, as interesting theories must, and then embarks on the crucial process of subject- ing theories – opposing ones and her own – to criticism based on the analysis of the available evidence. Crone’s sharp criticisms of some scholars are in the public record. Less pub- licly, we know of at least two graduate students whose initial encounters with her reduced them to tears (literally). In both cases, she subsequently took them under her wing as a mentor, continuing to provide them with frank feedback that helped them grow as thinkers and writers. We do not claim – nor would she – that her ideas have always been right; but she is right to use criticism as the means of pursuing the truth. This quality makes her more willing than most people to take seriously criticisms of her work and modify her positions, thus putting the truth and the process of critical inquiry above her ego. It would be an illusion to think that we could approach scholarship without reading into the evidence world views and premises – fallible presuppositions that are often shaped by education and socialization, our philosophical or ide- ological commitments, or simply our personalities and idiosyncrasies. Nor is it desirable to eliminate such background assumptions, since they are needed to 1 We are aware that the word “scientific,” like “truth,” makes some scholars cringe. x Preface bring the dead letter of the evidence to life, and since they may be right.2 The real question – the one that distinguishes critical acumen from dogmatism – is whether scholars are conscious of their assumptions, expose them to the test of the evidence, or take seriously other scholars’ attempts to do so.3 This ques- tion separates scholars who are lodged smugly and obliviously in their for- tresses of irrefutability from the intrepid ones, who formulate their ideas in the sharpest and most falsifiable (hence most vulnerable) forms possible, forge out into the open in their quest for the truth, welcoming battle, and in the process often end up somewhere far from where they started. Always searching, ques- tioning, arguing, and delighting in learning, Patricia Crone is that kind of a scholar. The following essays are gathered in her honor: Joseph Witztum’s essay, “Variant Traditions, Relative Chronology, and the Study of Intra-Quranic Parallels,” is about the relative chronology of multiple occurrences of stories in the Qurʾān. Focusing on the recurring narrative about the sin of Adam and his mate, he asks whether the relative similarity of one sura to pre-Islamic attestations can provide a clue to its relative chronological order. Robert Hoyland’s essay, “The Earliest Attestation of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P. Nessana 77 (60s ah/680 ce),” pro- duces an edition, translation, and study of two seventh-century Arabic letters on a papyrus. It contains the earliest attested mention of the phrase “the pro- tection of God and His messenger” (dhimmat Allāh wa-dhimmat rasūlihi). An appendix by Hannah Cotton accompanies the essay. Guy Stroumsa’s essay, “Jewish Christianity and Islamic Origins,” surveys the evidence for the hypothesis that Jewish Christians in Arabia contributed to the shape of the Qurʾān and the rise of Islam more generally. 2 There is a vast body of literature on this issue under the headings of the theory-dependence of evidence and the Duhem–Quine problem. For a philosophical analysis that acknowledges the inevitability of ideological influences and their compatibility with testing, learning, and discovery, see Longino, “Can There Be a Feminist Science?,” 45–57. 3 The fact that our interpretation of the evidence necessarily depends on theories does not make it impossible to test our theories by evidence. For example, it is not paradoxical to hold that a theory-dependent piece of evidence can be used to test the theory on which the obser- vation was based. It has been demonstrated that “the familiar claim that an observation that depends in an essential way on a theory cannot provide an objective test of that very theory is false” (Brown, “Theory-Laden Observation,” 559). Preface xi Karen Bauer’s essay, “A Note on the Relationship between Tafsīr and Common Understanding with Reference to Contracts of Marriage,” concerns the observation that a phrase that is attested in extant marriage contracts shows up also in the tafsīr literature. Gerald Hawting and David Eisenberg’s essay, “ ‘Earnest Money’ and the Sources of Islamic Law,” surveys the early Muslim jurists’ discussions of the bayʿ al-ʿarabūn (a contract for paying “earnest money”), with an eye to compa- rable institutions in other cultures, and concludes that it was part of the gen- eral Near Eastern heritage of early Muslims.
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