Stories, Saints, and Sanctity Between Christianity And

Home , Bahira, Cognomen, Francis Crawford Burkitt, Hans Jansen, Michael Cook (historian), Protevangelium

STORIES, SAINTS, AND SANCTITY

BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

REYHAN DURMAZ

B.A., MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, 2007

M.A., KOÇ UNIVERSITY, 2010

M.A., CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, 2012

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2019

This dissertation by Reyhan Durmaz is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Religious Studies as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Nancy Khalek, Reader

Date ______Suleiman Mourad, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Andrew Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA

Reyhan Durmaz was born in Turkey, in April 1984. Having lived and studied in various cities in south and north of Turkey, she moved to Ankara in 2002 to attend the Middle East

Technical University. Reyhan received her BA degree from the School of Economic and

Administrative Sciences in 2007. Following her undergraduate study, Reyhan attended the graduate program of Anatolian Civilizations and Cultural Heritage Management at Koç

University (Istanbul). After receiving her first MA degree in 2010, she attended the

Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University (Budapest), from which she graduated, cum laude, in 2012. In the same year Reyhan moved to Providence, RI, and started her doctoral studies at Brown University.

At Brown, Reyhan worked on late antique Christianity and early Islamic history.

Over the course of her doctoral studies, she served as the coordinator of the Graduate

Colloquium, Borders and Boundaries in the Late Ancient and early Medieval

Mediterranean (AY 2014-15), and as the academic coordinator of the Center for Eastern

Mediterranean Studies at CEU (AY 2015-16). She participated in multiple archaeological excavations, in Istanbul and in southeast Turkey. She is a co-translator of the Jacob of

Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met (2016), and a contributor to the Oxford

Dictionary of Late Antiquity (2018). Reyhan received a Dumbarton Oaks Summer

Fellowship in Byzantine Studies (2015), and a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship in

Byzantine Studies and Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in the 2018-19 academic year.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors of the saints’ stories that I studied in this dissertation take lines, sometimes pages, to tell their audiences that their feeble tongues and weak pens are not able to relate the amazing stories they are about to share. They say that it would be unfair to leave the stories in silence, but that they are only poorly and partially presenting the glorious, the terrifying, the exalted. Feeling like one of those authors, I am deeply thankful to my mentors, colleagues, and friends who made this research possible, and terrified to do injustice in acknowledging their contributions. The people I will mention in the following lines taught me, before anything else, generosity, perseverance, hard work, and humility. First and foremost, I owe my deepest gratitude to my two supervisors, Susan Harvey and Nancy Khalek. This research would not have been possible without their continued support, candid critique, generous engagement, and trustful foresight. I also had the privilege of working under the supervision of Suleiman Mourad. Every page of this dissertation benefited from his ideas, suggestions, and meticulous reading. The Department of Religious Studies at Brown University has been my home for seven years. I am immensely thankful to Nicole Vadnais and Tina Creamer for being fully supportive and helpful for everything I needed. Without their attendance, I would not have been able to accomplish anything. I would like to extend my gratitude to the Department’s directors of graduate studies, Janine Sawada and Stephen Bush. Brown Library and Brown Graduate School provided me with all of the resources necessary for my doctoral studies and dissertation. I am very lucky to lean on an institution so supportive and encouraging of their graduate students. In learning and research, having the opportunity to bounce your ideas off of great minds is priceless. Both in classroom and in extracurricular colloquia, I was nourished by my professors Jonathan Conant, Michael Satlow, Sarah Insley Say, Stratis Papaioannou, among others. I am deeply indebted to Niels Gaul for helping me develop my ideas at the earliest stages of this dissertation, and thoroughly and faithfully following the development of my project. Volker Menze has always been a great mentor and friend at every phase of my graduate studies. I am also immensely grateful to Sidney Griffith and Stephanos Efthymiadis for their supportive, insightful, and delightful conversations, and for generously sharing their work and ideas, which greatly improved this dissertation. At Brown University I have had an incredible group of friends, who nurtured me and every stage of my research. I am very grateful to Michael Payne, who has always been in the backstage of this project, cheering or challenging every idea of mine. We took courses together, traveled to conferences, translated obscure texts, proofread each other’s works, had fun, laughed, argued, then laughed more. Noah Tetenbaum, with his friendship, support, sincerity and care, made some of the most difficult times of this project easier for me. Laura Dingeldein has contributed to my research with her brilliant ideas and feedback

v and been a source of joy and laughter. Dora Ivanišević’s continuous friendship and support have been indispensable sources of comfort for me for more than ten years. Ayşe Şirin has been one of my favorite work companions, traveling to all the libraries and coffee shops of Providence and Istanbul with me. I also give my earnest thanks to Adrien Stoloff, Andrew Tobolowski, Daniel Picus, David Liao, Ed Peckham, Ian Randall, Kerry Sonia, Lynn Hernandez, Megan McBride, Rebecca Falcasantos, and Rob Kashow for being there every time I needed them. I would like to extend my thanks to the Syriac Studies community, the Dorushe, especially to Alberto Rigolio, Flavia Ruani, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, John Zaleski, Kyle Smith, Philip Forness, Salam Rassi, Sergey Minov, and Simcha Gross. Although we have been mostly far away, thanks to this community, I left every conference and workshop with new ideas, new friends, and new projects to look forward to. The final stage of this dissertation was supported by a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies. I cannot overstate my gratitude to Jan Ziolkowski, Emily Jacobs, Eden Slone, Anna Stavrokopoulou, Joshua Robinson, Alyson Williams for providing a great work environment, all of the resources I needed for my research, and for so generously supporting my project at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. It was also a delight to work alongside with the fellows at Dumbarton Oaks. Erin Walsh has been an amazing companion through the long working hours at the library. Daniel Caner has been the most honest and meticulous critic of my work; Christos Simelidis my most zealous supporter. The guidance Michael McCormick gave at the final stage of my project is invaluable. The fervent discussions with John Mulhall gave me many unforgettable moments of socratic conversation. It has also been a great pleasure to share thoughts, working hours, lunch, and laughter with Alberto Bardi, Anna Kelley, Carla Hernandez, Christine Griffiths, Mark Pawlowski, Sarah Leonard, Scotti Norman, Thomas Arentzen, and other fellows I had the privilege of spending an academic year with. My project was also generously supported by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship provided by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. I would like to thank the Newcombe Foundation for making this fellowship possible, and Susan Billmeier, who has been wonderful in assisting, organizing, and communicating the process. Matthew Norton, a.k.a. the Prophet, deserves my heartfelt thanks for celebrating with me all the milestones at the end of this project. My dear friend Behice Pehlivan has continuously been supportive of every brilliant and not-so-brilliant idea of mine. Without her unconditional love and friendship, I would have been less and done less. And lastly, my gratitude to my mother and brother, Hatice and Ibrahim, is beyond words. I have been away from you for too long. It does not, by any means, compare to the love and support you give me, but this imperfect dissertation is dedicated to you.

CONTENTS

Abbreviations …………………………………………………………………………...... ix

Introduction: Orality and Narrative Transmission in Antiquity ……………….……………….1

Hagiodiegesis: The practice of orally narrating saints’ stories ……………………….1 Narration and transmission in early Islam ……………………………….…………...…32 Traveling stories ………………………………………………………………………………46 The structure and format of the dissertation …………………………………………….56

Chapter 1 – Muhammad as a Storyteller ………………………………………………………….61

Storytelling in the Qur’ān ……………………………………………………………….….67 Broader literary contexts of qur’ānic storytelling ……………………………………...85 The functions of storytelling in Muhammad’s prophetic career ……………………90 Concluding remarks: Narrating stories after Muhammad ………………………….110

Chapter 2 - Christian Hagiography and Hermeneutics of the Qur’ān …………………….124

Exegesis and storytelling ………………………………………………………………….127 Sūrat al-kahf (Q18) ………………………………………………………………….……. 134 The Companions of the Cave in Q18:9-26 …………………………….…….139 The Rich Man and the Poor Man in Q18:32-44 …………………………….152 Moses, the unnamed servant of God, and the Two-horned in Q18:60-100 ……………………………………………………………………. 159 Concluding remarks ……………………………………………………………………….178

Chapter 3 - Non-Qur’ānic Functions of Christian Hagiography in Islamic Literature ...181

Remembering Antony ……………………………………………………………….…….182 South Arabian historiography and Dhū al-Qarnayn the Believing King ….…….201 St. George as a Muslim in al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh al-Rusul wal-Mulūk ………………219 Looking at buildings, narrating St. Marūthā …………………………………….…….230 Concluding remarks …………………………………………………………………….….239

Chapter 4 – From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ ……………………………………….242

Texts ………………………………………………………………………….……………….243

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From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ ……………………………………………...249 Ibn Isḥāq on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih ……………………………………262 Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in context ………………………………….…………………….…….266 Concluding remarks: Life and travels of a story ……………………………….…….287

Chapter 5 – Christian Hagiography in Islamic Literature: A Theoretical Overview …...289

Monks, monasticism, and the Islamic notion of sanctity ………………………...…289 Authorship and transmission of hagiographical knowledge ……………………….300 Contexts and routes of transmission …………………………………………………….310 Saints and their stories in non-literary contexts: A gesture towards future research …………………………………………………….…319

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………….….323

Appendix: Narrativescape of the Qur’ān …………………………………………………..…….329

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….…….….338

Primary sources: Texts and translations ………………………………………….…….338 Secondary sources ……………………………………………………………………….….346

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ABBREVIATIONS

An. Boll. Analecta Bollandiana AMS Paul Bedjan, ed., Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, 7 vols. (Paris/Leipzig, 1890-97) ARCBH Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 2 vols. (Ashgate, 2011-14) BHG Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 2nd edition (1909) BHO Paul Peeters, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (1910) BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies EI2 P. Bearman, et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Brill) EI3 Kate Fleet, et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition (Brill) EQ Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān (Brill) CHRC Church History and Religious Culture

CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium

DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers

GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies

JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik

JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam

JSS Journal of Semitic Studies

PO Patrologia Orientalis (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1903-)

WBCQ Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi, eds., The Wiley Blackwell

Companion to the Qur’ān (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2006) ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlӓndischen Gesellschaft

INTRODUCTION: ORALITY AND NARRATIVE TRANSMISSION IN ANTIQUITY

This dissertation is a study of encounters and interactions between Christianity and Islam, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, through the lens of authors, narrators, and audiences of saints’ stories. It asks two questions: 1) through which mechanisms were stories of particularly non-biblical holy men and women transmitted into the Islamic tradition? and

2) towards what semiotic purposes were these stories reoriented, recontextualized, and reinterpreted in Islam? The answer to the former question lies within a broad and dynamic understanding of cultural transmission in antiquity, for which a close look into public preaching, particularly storytelling, in the realm of hagiographical production and circulation, is essential. For the latter question, namely, the post-transmission trajectories of saints’ stories, a thorough conceptualization of intertextualities, literary transmissions and translations, reception histories and changing symbolisms is necessary. Through these two groups of analyses, informed by cultural and literary theories, I demonstrate both the participation of Christian saints’ hagiographical dossiers in the development of Islamic categories and conventions of sanctity and piety, and the dynamics of religious encounter, interaction, and dialectic between Christian and Islamic communities in the Middle Ages.

1. Hagiodiegesis: The practice of orally narrating saints’ stories

I do not venture to dismiss in silence those narratives about the Saint which I received from my fathers, for fear lest the Lord should justly torture me in His great and terrible day for not having given into the bank the talent, through His will entrusted to me for

the edification and profit of the many. Being thus fortified by your prayers I will put down truthfully everything I heard from the men who were the saint’s disciples before me and I will also truly relate all the things I saw with my own eyes. For it is certain that the Lord ‘will surely destroy them that speak lies.’ I therefore beseech you lovers of learning to cast aside all thoughts of this present life and grant me your favorable hearing.

This passage is from the opening of the Life and Works of Daniel the Stylite, the renowned fifth-century saint in Constantinople.1 One can easily imagine these exact sentences orally delivered to an audience at the column of the holy man. Greek and Syriac hagiography - writings about the lives, miracles, pious deeds, and exhortative sayings of holy men and women- is in fact replete with information regarding oral narration of saints’ stories in antiquity.2 A story of a saint is a discursive oral continuum, punctuated by instances of texts. 3 Therefore, understanding, if partial, the oral mechanisms through which

1 Elizabeth Dawes and Norman H. Baynes, trans., Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies of St. Daniel the Stylite, St. Theodore of Sykeon and St. John the Almsgiver (New York: St. Vladimir Press, 1977), 7. 2 By “oral narration/performance” I refer to both the oral narration of saints’ stories prior to being put in writing, and the oral performances of hagiographical texts after stories were written. I do not distinguish between these two modes of orality of hagiography, which Alexander Kazhdan identifies as primary and secondary orality. Alexander Kazhdan, A History of Byzantine Literature, 650-850 (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, Institute for Byzantine Research, 1999), 152. 3 The continuous nature of discourse between the oral and the written in the context of the Bible has been extensively studied, and some of the works in this vast field have had a great impact on the formation of my ideas, such as: Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); Walter Ong, “Text as interpretation: Mark and after,” Semeia 39 (1987): 7-26; Bridget Gilfillan Upton, Hearing Mark’s Endings. Listening to Ancient Popular Texts Through Speech Act Theory (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006). What I describe as “punctuated by texts,” Ong describes as “interrupted” by texts: “But there is no way to ‘fix’ discourse, even by writing or printing it. A text does certainly separate an utterance from its author who, once he has written down his text, may as well be dead. In this sense, writing creates autonomous discourse. But removing an utterance from its author is not removing it from discourse. No utterance can exist outside discourse, outside a transactional setting. Putting an utterance into script can only interrupt discourse, string it out indefinitely in time and space. But not ‘fix’ it.” Ong, “Text as interpretation,” 9.

2 hagiographical stories were transmitted in antiquity across geographical, temporal, confessional, and linguistic boundaries is important, since it sheds significant light on the processes of composition of saints’ stories, and the development of their broader dossiers.

It also enhances our reconstruction of a significant pietistic practice in antiquity, namely, the oral-auditory practice of hagiographical storytelling, which I refer to as hagiodiegesis, one of the three major methods through which saints’ stories orally circulated in antiquity.4

What is storytelling? In modern scholarship, oral or textual composition is referred to as storytelling when it has fictitious, ahistorical or invented elements (also referred to as

“fabulation” in literary criticism), and it is generally ascribed to the popular, folkloric realm.5 Recent studies have widely discussed the definitions and connotations of historicity and invention in hagiographical literature, pointing out the fluid and ever-shifting boundaries between historiography, biography, and belles-lettres.6 Criticizing the modern impositions on fact vs. invention, scholars suggest focusing on verisimilitude instead of historicity, and considering alternative terms like “factography,” instead of the rigid binary of narrating fact-or-fiction, while studying storytelling as a mode of composition.7 I define

4 The other two methods of oral delivery of stories are reading texts out loud and encomiastic preaching in liturgical contexts, on which more below. 5 The field owes greatly to the works of Milman Parry, Albert Lord and Geoffrey Kirk on the Homeric epic. For a recent review of the scholarship, see Elizabeth Minchin, “Poet, audience, time, and text: Reflections on medium and mode in Homer and Virgil,” in Between Orality and Literacy: Communication and Adaptation in Antiquity, ed. Ruth Scodel (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014), 267-88. 6 For examples, see Stefan Leder, ed., Story-telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998); Panagiotis Roilos, ed., Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014); Carolina Cupane and Bettina Krönung, eds., Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016). 7 Anthony Kaldellis, “The emergence of literary fiction in Byzantium and the paradox of plausibility,” in Medieval Greek Storytelling, ed. Roilos, 115-129; Tomas Hӓgg, “Fiction and factography in the Life of St. Antony,” in Medieval Greek Storytelling, ed. Roilos, 31-40. For some of the major discussions of fictitious narrative and historiography in Islam, see Fred

3 storytelling as composing and presenting a narrative (unfolding of events in a chronological sequence, with a certain degree of character and context development) with the purpose of communicating a message to an audience, requiring and enabling the listener/reader’s visualization of the things narrated.

This definition of storytelling is informed by Gérard Genette’s narratology model, which elaborates on the distinctions between story, narrative and narration.8 Following this model, I use the term story (of a saint) to refer to the historical moment, real or imagined, in which the life, deeds, martyrdom, etc. of the holy man or woman took place; narrative to refer to a specific articulation of that story, oral or textual, in a certain genre, language, style; and narration to the act of narrating, the expression which includes not only a particular articulation of the story (the narrative), but also paralinguistic elements such as medium (if textual), and performative language (if oral). Christian hagiography, according to this model, consists of textual narratives regarding saints’ stories, which circulated

(alongside with oral narratives) through multiple methods and modes of narration.

Narrative is the representation that reduces a story, a real or imagined historical moment, to an object, a group of sentences and expressions that narrate the event. To illustrate, Saint George Megalomartyros being martyred in the time of Emperor Diocletian

(r. 284-305) through extensive torture, is a story. The version of this story in the Church

Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998); Thomas Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community in Islamic Late Antiquity,” Past & Present 185 (2004): 9-42; Suleiman Mourad, Early Islam in Myth and History (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006), 6-15; Nancy Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17-23, 39-84, et passim. 8 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 27; Thomas Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts: An Introduction (Malden; Oxford; Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 81ff; Gregory Castle, The Literary Theory Handbook (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2013), 51-73.

History of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339) in Chapter 5 of Book 8, written in Greek, is a narrative. Although every story is a narrative, a narrative is only a representation of the gestalt of that story. The third component of the model, narration, accordingly, is what I refer to as storytelling. The act of presenting a story, shaped by the tone, voice, perspective, purpose, and rhetorical choices of the composer/narrator, as a result of which a particular narrative is communicated to the audience who visualizes the story and creates meaning.

The relationship between hagiography and orality is complex, often presented as an ontological dilemma. In scholarship, two contexts are brought to fore to emphasize the role oral tradition played in the emergence of Christian hagiography in antiquity: circulation of martyrs’ stories in urban contexts,9 and the monastic folklore of the Egyptian desert in late antiquity.10 Oral tradition certainly provided numerous themes, topoi and rhetorical formulae for hagiographical writing. 11 Although many elocutionary,

9 Hippolyte Delehaye, Legends of the Saints (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 13ff; Marina Detoraki, “Greek passions of the martyrs in Byzantium,” in ARCBH, 2:62ff; David Frankfurter, “Hagiography and the reconstruction of local religion in late antique Egypt,” CHRC 86, no.1 (2006): 18; Sebastian Brock, “Saints in Syriac: A little-tapped resource,” JECS 16, no. 2 (2008): 185. 10 For a useful treatment of the relationship between orality and written texts in the Egyptian monastic context, see Douglas Burton-Christie, “Listening, reading, praying: Orality, literacy and the shape of early monastic spirituality,” Anglican Theological Review 83, no. 2 (2001): 197-222. The other prominent discussions are, Catherine Hezser, “Apophthegmata Patrum and Apophthegmata of the Rabbis,” in La narrativa cristiana antica: codici narrativi, strutture formali, schemi retorici, XXIII incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana, 5-7 maggio 1994, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 50 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1995), 453-464; Matthew Dickie, “Narrative patterns in Christian hagiography,” GRBS 40, no. 1 (1999): 98; Claudia Rapp, “The origins of hagiography and the literature of early monasticism: Purpose and genre between tradition and innovation,” in The Unclassical Traditions, vol. 1: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity, eds. Christopher Kelly, Richard Flower and Michael Stuart Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 2010), 1:124; John Wortley, “The genre of the spiritually beneficial tale,” Scripta & e-Scripta 8-9 (2010): 71-91; André Binggeli, “Collections of edifying stories,” in ARCBH, 2:143-159; Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Redeeming the genre’s remnants: Some beneficial tales written in the last century of Byzantium,” Scripta & e- Scripta 8-9 (2010): 307-325. 11 Following Averil Cameron, I use “rhetoric” not in its technical sense, but broadly to refer to “characteristic means and ways of expression.” Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of

5 paralinguistic, prosodic, and performative elements are lost when a story is textualized, hagiography is replete with linguistic features that indicate that the written stories were performative “experiences reduced to objects.” 12 These performative experiences, one must emphasize, did not cease after the textualization of stories, although historians tend to think about stories in terms of a dichotomy between their oral phases and post- textualization trajectories.13 Stories continued to be orally performed, and texts were reintegrated into oral traditions of saints’ dossiers. In this continuum, where orality and textuality perpetually feed into each other, finding the narrators and listeners of stories is an exciting yet difficult question. This question has been raised in many recent works on

the Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 13-14. 12 Albert Lord, “Oral composition and ‘oral residue’ in the Middle Ages,” in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. W.F.H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton; New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 9, 14. 13 Burton-Christie’s work, for example, at times draws a stark distinction between “oral peoples/cultures” and the literate ones, and presents the dialogue between the two modes of expression (the oral and the written) as a tension and resistance. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 207-8.

Greek-Byzantine hagiography.14 It is a desideratum, however, in Syriac hagiography, and other non-Greek traditions.15

Hagiographical literature provides two categories of information with regard to the orality of saints’ stories. The first type is the “oral residue” that is embedded within the rhetoric of texts.16 Having analyzed examples of Greek-Byzantine hagiography, Stephanos

Efthymiadis and Nikos Kalogeras discuss the following four categories to trace the

“tradition of oral performance having been encoded in rhetorical formulae,” namely, 1) use of simple language, 2) particular titles of texts, such as “narration” (diegesis), 3) use of verbs indicating speech within the text, and 4) address to an audience, and discourse pertaining to hearing/listening.17 One might add other features to this list, such as questions posed at the audience, extensive use of direct speech and dialogues between characters, fabulous and fantastic elements with vivid details, repetitive, parallel or appositional

14 Rapp, “Origins of hagiography;” idem., “Figures of female sanctity: Byzantine edifying manuscripts and their audience,” DOP 50 (1996): 313-344; idem., “Storytelling as spiritual communication in early Greek hagiography: The use of diegesis,” JECS 6, no. 3 (1998): 431-448; Alice-Mary Talbot, “Old wine in new bottles: Rewriting of the saints’ lives in the Paleologan Period,” in The Twilight of Byzantium: Aspects of Cultural and Religious History in the Late Byzantine Empire: Papers from the Colloquium Held at Princeton University 8-9 May 1989, eds. Slobodan Ćurčić and Doula Mouriki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15-26, see esp. 17-18; Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 197-222; Stephanos Efthymiadis, “The Byzantine hagiographer and his audience in the ninth and tenth centuries,” in Metaphrasis: Reductions and Audiences in Middle Byzantine Hagiography, ed. Christian Høgel (Bergen: KULT, 1996), 60-80; Nikos Kalogeras, “The role of the audience in the construction of a narrative: A note on Cyril of Scythopolis,” JÖB 52 (2002): 149-59; Stephanos Efthymiadis and Nikos Kalogeras, “Audience, language and patronage in Byzantine hagiography,” in ARCBH, 2:247-284. 15 Analyzed in Reyhan Durmaz, “Hearing sanctity: Oral performance and aural consumption of hagiographical stories in the late antique and medieval Syriac milieu,” (forthcoming). 16 Burton-Christie, following Ong, uses the term “residual orality” to refer to such linguistic features that reflect orality. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 207; Ong, “Text as interpretation,” 14, 15, 19. 17 Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience,” 248-53. These features of hagiography as indicators of orality are also pointed out in Dickie, “Narrative patterns,” 98; Rapp, “Spiritual communication,” 436-8, 442, 447.

7 phraseology (creating repetitions, emphasis, and euphony), poetry, and prayers. These features make hagiographical texts sound like transcripts of oral performance. Although many of these features are rhetorical and stylistic conventions of hagiography, one may assume that whenever the stories were orally performed, some of them were employed.18

“Residual orality,” in Ong’s words, “can envelop even a highly developed textuality,” in contexts in which writing was at the service of orality.19 Thus, it is important to highlight such literary features for hagiography in light of speech-act or reader-response theories,20 since hagiography was mostly consumed aurally in antiquity, and such narratological items give glimpses of the language and style used during oral performances.

The second category of information about orality in hagiographical texts is the representations of oral narration of saints’ stories. We have significantly limited evidence, all in the form of textual descriptions of instances where a story of a saint is orally narrated to an individual or group. Despite the scarcity and restrictive nature of such textual representations, with a close and comparative reading, they throw invaluable light into practices of orally narrating saints’ stories. Literal reading of hagiographical texts for historical information is highly problematic.21 A comparative reading of a group of texts, however, can highlight general attitudes, dynamics, and tendencies. In Sebastian Brock and

18 I do not claim that these linguistic features were restricted to Christian hagiographical writing. In fact, almost all of these modes of expression, vocabulary, and tropes were used in non- Christian narrative in antiquity as Peter Turner extensively demonstrates in Truthfulness, passim. 19 Ong, “Text as interpretation,” 19. 20 Speech-act theory mainly focuses on what language “does” to the audience instead of what it signifies in its literary context. Sandy Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory (New York; London: Routledge, 1990), 42ff; for “performative utterances,” see Simon Shepherd, The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 4. For an application of this theory to ancient texts, see Upton, Hearing Mark’s Endings, passim. 21 For the opposing arguments in scholarship, see Turner, Truthfulness, 7-18.

Susan Harvey’s words, “[hagiographical stories] had to be true to the thought world of their time, as well as to the ordinary manner of people’s lives, their way of doing things and seeing things. So, these stories reveal to us not the individuals of their day but rather something of the world in which they lived and moved. From this view these stories offer us a rich harvest of historical depth.”22 With this understanding of hagiography, I present a brief survey of a group of Greek and Syriac texts, and demonstrate the sorts of information gathered from hagiography as to who narrated saints’ stories, how, and in which contexts, through the textual representations of oral narration of hagiographical stories.

A few words about manuscripts are fitting here. The majority of hagiographical texts were written in monastic or ecclesiastic scriptoria, for polemical, exegetical or liturgical purposes. 23 The targeted audiences were generally not individuals, but communities; rarely do we have manuscripts written by or in possession of individuals for personal use.24 This nature of production and preservation imposes certain restrictions on our understanding of hagiography and circulation of saints’ stories in antiquity. Some of these texts, particularly the ones composed for liturgical purposes, were by nature written for oral performance. Their textual features are inextricable from their function. 25

22 Sebastian Brock and Susan Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3. 23 For the functions of Syriac hagiography, see Brock, “Saints in Syriac,” 187-9; idem., “Syriac hagiography,” 265-66. 24 For an overview of Syriac manuscripts and saints’ lives, see André Binggeli, “Les collections de vies de saints dans les manuscrits syriaques,” in L’hagiographie syriaque, ed. André Binggeli (Paris: Gauthner, 2012), 49-75. 25 Highlighted for homiletic and hymnographic literature in Kazhdan, History of Byzantine Literature, 153. For the interdependence between hymnography and hagiography, see Robert Taft and Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “Synaxarion,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan (Oxford University Press, 2005). Accessed: May 29, 2018. doi:

Therefore, when we talk about the oral aspects of such hagiographical writing, the oral language of liturgy is an inseparable part of the analysis. Moreover, study based on liturgical manuscripts leads to the development of an understanding that hagiography mainly belonged to the liturgical realm. This conceptualization neglects the non-liturgical contexts within which saints’ stories circulated, and the broader gestalt of hagiography extending beyond the textual expressions and liturgical uses. Against this backdrop of the nature of manuscripts in which they are found, I now turn to oral performance of hagiographical stories.

There were three different modes of oral performance through which hagiographical stories widely circulated in late antique Christianity: 1) reading texts out loud, 2) encomiastic preaching, and 3) orally narrating stories of saints (hagiodiegesis).

Cultural-historical works with a focus on communal reading practices in Christian communities have immensely contributed to our understanding of the contexts in which saints’ stories were read to public audiences.26 Similarly, encomiastic-homiletic preaching

10.1093/acref/9780195046526.001.0001. Also see, Martin Hinterberger, “Byzantine hagiography and its literary genres. Some critical observations,” in ARCBH, 2:25-60; Antonia Giannouli, “Byzantine hagiography and hymnography: An interrelationship,” in ARCBH, 2:285-312; Frankfurter, “Hagiography and the reconstruction of local religion,” 17-18. For Syriac hagiography and liturgy, see David Taylor, “Hagiographie et liturgie syriaque,” in L’hagiographie syriaque, ed. Binggeli, 77-112. Also see Forness, Preaching Christology, 31-33. 26 Guy Stroumsa, “The new self and reading practices in late antique Christianity,” CHRC 95 (2015): 1-18; Efthymiadis, “Audience, language, and patronage,” 256, 261-3; Peter van Minnen, “Saving history? Egyptian hagiography in its space and time,” CHRC 86, no. 1/4 (2006): 71; Rosemary Morris, “The political saint of the eleventh century,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 45; Rapp, “Figures of female sanctity,” 313-344; Efthymiadis, “Byzantine hagiographer,” 60-80; Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church. A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), 82-143. Note that Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) explicitly told the receiver of his letter, in which the Life of Antony is narrated, to “read these things now to the other brothers;” Robert Gregg, trans., Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 99 (§94).

10 has been pointed out as a significant method of oral delivery of hagiography.27 However, a systematic study of the oral delivery of hagiography outside the realm of reading is a major desideratum in scholarship. Such study is critical for our understanding of this significant medium through which stories’ and texts’ formation, reaching their audiences, circulation, modification, and transmission across temporal, geographical and confessional boundaries were facilitated.

I use the term hagiodiegesis to refer to the practice of narrating a saint’s story in the absence of a text. It may be inspired by a written account, but the practice does not necessarily require the presence of a text, unlike in the practice of reading out loud. I have coined the term hagiodiegesis as a counterpart of hagiography; orally narrating saints’ life, deeds, sayings and miracles as an alternative to writing them. In modern scholarship, the practice of narrating saints’ stories is generally studied under storytelling or spiritual instruction.28 Hagiodiegesis is certainly a type of storytelling (and I use the two terms interchangeably), and a method used in spiritual instruction, but these terms are too generic to articulate the dynamics of the pietistic act of telling stories of holy men and women for monastic or lay Christian audiences in antiquity.

27 The most recent work on homiletic preaching in the eastern Mediterranean is Philip Forness, Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East: A Study of Jacob of Serugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 22-55. Also see Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 15-22, 35-39. For homily as encomion, see Frederick Norris, “Your honor, my reputation: St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Funeral Oration on St. Basil the Great,” in Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, eds. Thomas Hӓgg and Philip Rousseau (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press 2000), 140-159; Hinterberger, “Byzantine hagiography,” 25-60; Giannouli, “Byzantine hagiography and hymnography,” 285-312; Talbot, “Old wine in new bottles,” 17-18. 28 Efthymiadis, “Audience, language and patronage,” 261; Rapp, “Spiritual communication,” 432, 437, 441.

Hagiodiegesis, like hagiography, renders the saint present to the audience.29 Yet, there is great space for ad hoc composition, unlike in the practice of reading out loud or preaching encomia. Thus, it has the full connotation of composing a story and authorship.

“Composition in performance,” Albert Lord emphasizes, should be strictly distinguished from improvisation, and this applies to hagiodiegesis as well.30 The oral narration of stories was often in conversation with literary traditions; therefore, narrating a saint’s story was rarely a complete improvisation. Narratives were flexible, the details of a story changed from narration to narration. Yet, all of this flexibility and non-fixity took place within the boundaries of a familiar dossier. Each episode of hagiodiegesis presents and reinforces a part of the collective archival knowledge.31

Hagiographical literature is replete with examples of the practice of hagiodiegesis, where a solitary ascetic, monk or an ecclesiast, generally in a monastic context (though also in urban contexts) narrates stories of saints (or of him/herself) for the spiritual instruction and edification of the listener. The listener could be a fellow monk, a cleric or lay person. It is these representations to which I now turn. In the Lives of the Eastern Saints of John of Ephesus (d.586), the following account is given, in the chapter on the Lives of

Thomas and Stephen:

But he used to go down into that pit and come up again, that he might not put force upon his body all at once and faint and be overcome, while the blessed men who were the occasion of his going out to that place supplied his necessary requirements. And

29 For an elaboration on the distinction between physicial and implied audiences of public address, a very useful study is Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, “Audience addressed/ audience invoked: The role of audience in composition theory and pedagogy,” College Compoisition and Communication 35, no. 2 (1984): 155-71. 30 Lord, “Oral composition,” 9. 31 For religious collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 84-119.

so in that pit he laid great and grievous labours upon himself, and was without ceasing continuously occupied in weeping and sorrow and mourning for his sins, and these blessed men (since these also were very perfect in their manner of life) used to relate to me, “Whenever we see the blessed Thomas, we find him beating his face, and saying, ‘Woe to me, my brethren, since I have consumed my days in vanity […].’ As often as he saw us” (these blessed men used to say to me), “by reason of the sound of his sobs and his weeping and mourning for his soul he would make us also weep […].”32

The above passage is an example of a literary representation of the oral narration of hagiographical stories that we find in texts. In this example, a group of monks visit the holy man Thomas, and they describe to John of Ephesus (the author of the text), in detail, the pit where the holy man lived and the latter’s ascetic practices. Although this is John’s textual representation of a narration, it points to a group of possible dynamics of hagiodiegesis in antiquity: local pilgrims as narrators, an ascetic as the subject, a bishop as a listener (and recorder) of the story of a holy man. Let us bring in further examples to fill under these rubrics that are essential for our understanding of ancient storytelling, namely, contexts, subjects, and audiences of hagiodiegesis.

Contexts for hagiographical storytelling

The diary of the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria is a well-known witness of pilgrimage as an important context in which stories of holy men and women were narrated in antiquity.

During her travels she observed that “monks’ conversation is always either about God’s scriptures or the deeds of the great monks.”33 Written around the same time, the Syriac Life

32 E. W. Brooks, ed. and trans., “John of Ephesus: Lives of the Eastern Saints,” PO 17, no. 1; 18, no. 4; 19, no. 2 (1923, 1925), 193. 33 John Wilkinson, trans., Egeria’s Travels (London: SPCK, 1971), 20.13, 23.1.

13 of Simeon the Stylite mentions Naaman, an Arab king, stating during a feast that the

“reports of the saint reached” them, and some Arabs began to go up to him.34 These and such accounts attest to the long routes of pilgrimage across which saints’ stories traveled.

“Spiritual tourism,” Peter Turner says, “by such figures as Palladius35 and Egeria can only have bolstered these traditions by disseminating these stories about monks not only beyond but also further within and around the desert world.”36 John of Ephesus’ account cited above is another attestation of this practice, while pointing at smaller, local pilgrimage contexts.

In the chapter on Mary, who travels to Jerusalem and lives an ascetic life at

Golgotha, John of Ephesus again informs his readers of pilgrims as narrators of stories:

And afterwards some persons who knew her and were well acquainted with her admirable modes of life came thither and found her sitting before Golgotha with her eyes raised and looking at it and weeping with ecstatic wonder. And on seeing her they fell down and made obeisance to her, and saluted her; but she was troubled, because she did not wish that men should know her there. Then these persons told many about the perfect modes of life of the blessed woman from her childhood down to her old age, and many marveled at her.37

34 Robert Doran, trans., “The Syriac Life of Saint Simeon the Stylite,” in The Lives of Simeon Stylites, trans. and intr. Robert Doran (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992),146 §67. 35 Bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia (fifth c.) who traveled to the Egyptian desert and collected anecdotes of desert ascetics, a collection known as the Lausiac History, for it was written for Lausus, a chamberlain at the court of Emperor Theodosius II (r. 408-450). For an annotated translation, see Robert Meyer, trans., Palladius: The Lausiac History (New York: Paulist Press, 1964). 36 Turner, Truthfulness, 86. 37 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 169.

In the following episode, from the chapter on the Lives of Simeon and Sergius, a group of men visit Sergius, an ascetic in the north of Amida. During this visit, Sergius speaks about the holiness of another recluse, named Simeon, to his visitors:

some men from the territory of the city οf Amida [...] heard of that saint, and were eager to go and be blessed by him; and, when they had gone and had come to him and been blessed by him, he asked them, “Whence are you, my sons?”; and they said, “From the north of Amida.” The blessed man said to them: “But what, my sons, do I for my part really know? and wherefore did you come to my wretched self? lf you are from the north of Amida, wherefore did you not go to the pillar of light which stands in the northern country, who to-day has been serving God in his saints for forty years, and has not grown tired or weary, nor is yet satiated with so doing? Wherefore, my sons, did you not go to this man, who has refreshed God in the persons of the weary, who has also caused the savior of his practices and of his purpose that is good and acceptable at all times to reach to the heavens of heavens?” But these men on hearing these things from the saint fell on their faces and continued entreating him and saying: “Who, sir, is he of whom you have said these things to us?”38

In the paragraph above, the visitors ask the holy man who he is narrating about, and the blessed Sergius tells them that this Simeon lives in reclusion on top of a hill in a village named Kalesh, and he tells his visitors to give his blessings to that recluse saint. During local pilgrimage, the example shows, visitors did not only learn about the holy man or woman they visited, but also heard about stories of other saints. This practice creates broader networks of saints, stories, and loca sancta; as depicted by John of Ephesus,

Sergius, through his narration, connects the visitors’ experience at his cell to another recluse far away. One may assume that such expanded oral narratives, through which

38 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 109-10.

15 persona and stories of various saints are brought into the stories of local holy men and women, often took place in the context of local pilgrimage, possibly leading to conflations of multiple hagiographical dossiers. It is beyond the scope of this introduction to analyze the mechanisms of hagiographical conflation; suffice it to say that the brief narrative quoted above points at saints’ shrines and ascetics’ cells as a place where stories were narrated and were connected to broader hagiographical traditions.

Pilgrimage often included healings and exorcisms, and stories of such miracles of saints were narrated by visitors or disciples at saints’ shrines. Simeon the Stylite’s hagiographer gives an extensive and lively account in which a group of people from

Lebanon come to Simeon asking for help against wild beasts and demons that cause terror in their villages.39 Simeon, upon receiving their promise to become Christians, gives them blessed earth (ḥnānā), and tells them to mark the borders of their village and keep vigils for three days. After the beasts were defeated, the author says, some of the people came back, stayed at the saints’ shrine for a week, and related before everybody how their village was saved by Simeon. Similarly, in a few passages, the author writes about sailors who saw Simeon in open sea and were saved from difficult maritime circumstances through his prayers and power, and came and related these visions at the saint’s shrine before public audiences.40 Regardless of whether these public narrations took place in real life, the text tells us that in the social milieu of the author, narrating miracle stories at saints’ shrines

39 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 141-43 (§62-63). 40 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 151-53 (§70-72).

16 was a familiar practice.41 These and such textual representations point at not only the variety of hagiographical stories, but also the multitude of narrators.

Disciples and visitors as narrators of saints’ stories are attested in other texts as well. The author of the Life of the Man of God (fifth c.), for instance, says: “this narrative about the man of God […] was publicly proclaimed by that custodian who was the friend of the blessed one.” 42 The redactor of the Life of Hypatius (fifth-century abbot in

Constantinople) notes that he heard about the story from a disciple of the holy man in a diegesis. 43 In the Qartmin Trilogy, the stories of the three founding fathers of the

Monastery of Mar Gabriel in northern Mesopotamia, we read about a disciple narrating the aftermath of a miracle of his master.44 Leontios of Neapolis (seventh c.), the hagiographer of Saint John the Almsgiver/Merciful (d. 610), wrote down the saint’s life during a narration of Menas, the treasurer of the church in the time of John the Almsgiver, as they were sitting side-by-side.45 As Claudia Rapp and Thomas Hӓgg emphasize, these literary tools were often used in order to show the transmission of knowledge, and thus affirm the

41 A prominent testimony of this practice comes from Constantinople. At numerous healing shrines of saints, Efthymiadis demonstrates, visitors narrated miraculous healing stories, which were incorporated into the saints’ hagiographical dossiers. Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Collections of miracles (fifth – fifteenth centuries),” in ARCBH, 2:103-142. 42 Robert Doran, trans., “The Man of God: The original Syriac life,” in Stewards of the Poor: The Man of God, Rabbula and Hiba in Fifth-Century Edessa, ed. Robert Doran (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2006), 25. 43 Rapp, “Spiritual communication,” 437. 44 Andrew Palmer, trans., “Qartmin Trilogy,” microfiche supplement to Andrew Palmer, Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), lxxix. The Trilogy was ostensibly compiled in the ninth century, although some parts of it are dated to earlier time periods. 45 Dawes and Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints, 209-210.

17 historicity (as opposed to the fictitious character) of the account.46 Nevertheless, these statements in hagiography, that the authors heard the stories from their hero’s disciples, probably carry a kernel of truth: disciples and visitors of ascetics often narrated their stories to public audiences.

Monasteries and shrines, although the most prominent, were not the only context for hagiodiegesis. Household was also a significant context for this practice. For example, we know of Melania the Elder (d. 410) continuously instructed her family members on

Scripture,47 “pierced” her granddaughter Melania with stories she narrated;48 she was also likely one of the main sources for Palladius’ Lausiac History, narrating to him both her own life and the lives of other desert ascetics.49 Her veneration of Perpetua and Felicitas, and fashioning her own piety based on the story of the two martyrs, is a great manifestation of the intricate relationship between household piety and hagiography.50

The household was neither geographically nor socially separated from the monastic realm. Samuel Rubenson, for example, demonstrates that learned ascetics worked as teachers in towns and villages in antiquity.51 In similar vein, in the story of Simeon and

46 Hӓgg and Rousseau, “Introduction,” in Biography and Panegyric, 13; Rapp, “Spiritual communication,” 432, 439. 47 Robin Darling Young, “A life in letters,” in Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family, eds. Catherine Chin and Caroline Schroeder (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 161-66. 48 Christine Luckritz Marquis, “Namesake and inheritance,” in Melania, eds. Chin and Schroeder, 38. 49 Ibid., 36. 50 Stephanie Cobb, “Memories of the martyrs,” in Melania, eds. Chin and Schroeder, 118-9, 123- 4. For the story of Perpetua and Felicitas, see Eliezer Gonzales, The Fate of the Dead in the Early Third Century North African Christianity: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas and Tertullian (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). 51 Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 106. For pedagogical role of Christian teaching, see Henri Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison: The University of

Sergius in the Lives of the Eastern Saints, the two monks found a monastery nearby a village in northern Mesopotamia, and instruct village boys, through a small window, on the scriptures, psalms, and most probably on lives and deeds of saints.52 The examples underline how stories of saints – dead and alive – likely traveled between the village (and thus the Christian household) and the monastery through pedagogical means.

Hagiographical learning, in certain cases, was based in the household itself. Saint

Macrina (fourth c.), who was a spiritual instructor at her household, is one of the most prominent examples of this.53 Elizabeth of Heracleia (fifth c.), abbess in Constantinople, according to her hagiographer, was instructed on the lives of saints in her childhood by her father.54 John of Ephesus writes about Euphemia, who instructs her daughter in the psalms and the scriptures at their home. 55 These accounts, scholars emphasize, prescribed a household model of asceticism and learning for urban Christian communities, especially for women’s piety and asceticism.56 And it is safe to situate the practice of narrating saints’ stories within this context.

Wisconsin Press, 1982), 314-15; Adam Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 22ff. 52 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 89. 53 Virginia Woods Callahan, trans., “The Life of Saint Macrina,” in Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 159-92; Virginia Burrus, “Gender, eros, and pedagogy: Macrina’s pious household,” in Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau, eds. Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 167-81. 54 François Halkin, “Sainte Élisabeth d’Héraclée, abesse a Constantinople,” An. Boll. 91 (1973): 256. 55 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 171. 56 Fotis Vasileiou, “At a still point of a turning world: Privacy and asceticism in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of St. Macrina,” Byzantion 82 (2012): 459-61; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 10, 19-26.

Hagiographical literature points at yet other contexts for narrating saints’ stories.

The prison, for example, is presented as a place for spiritual instruction and hearing saints’ lives and deeds. 57 Theatrical performances was another context in which biblical, apocryphal, and likely hagiographical stories were performed.58 And last but not least, funerals of holy men and women appear to have been a context in which disciples, as well as others who had spiritual encounters with the saints, narrated stories about them. An interesting account related to this is found in the Life of Basil attributed to Amphilochius of Iconium (d. 394), in which a penitent woman narrates to the public at Basil of Caesarea’s

(d. 379) funeral how she asked Basil to erase her sins, but because he sent her away to another holy man who could not help her, and in the meantime Basil died, not all of her sins were erased.59 This story not only emphasizes funerals as a storytelling context, but also indicates that people occasionally narrated their sins, penitence, and more interestingly, how the holy man or woman were not able to help them.

Narrators of stories

Since almost all of the hagiographers were men, it is difficult to reconstruct how gender played a role in the narration of stories. In the examples cited heretofore, narrators of stories appear to be men, but we are informed of ascetic women who also narrated saints’ stories

57 Paul Bedjan, ed., “Neṣḥanā d-Zbīnā,” AMS Syriace 2 (1968): 40. 58 Ruth Webb, Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 25ff, 35-43, 202-216; Charlotte Roueché, “A world full of stories,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown, eds. Philip Rousseau and Manolis Papoutsakis (Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 177-185. For itinerant storytellers and other entertainers in the Greco-Roman world, see Alex Scobie, “Storytellers, storytelling and the novel in Graeco-Roman antiquity,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Neue Folge 122, no. 3/4 (1979): 229-59. 59 Amphilochius of Iconium, Vita Basilii (BHG 258), ed. F. Combefis (Paris, 1644), 219-20.

20 to their disciples and visitors.60 John of Ephesus, for example, says that he learnt about the holy woman Susan’s pious deeds from the other blessed women who had lived with her.61

More prominent examples of women narrators of stories in the context of the eastern

Mediterranean come from Greek hagiography. Tim Vivian demonstrates that towns and suburbs in Egypt hosted many women living a monastic or proto-monastic life, who most probably read and narrated saints’ lives.62 The desert ascetic Syncletica of Palestine, as

Vivian states, might have de facto narrated her story (as it is presented in her Life) to the monk who visited her, Silas. 63 Literature also points to examples from Syria and

Mesopotamia. St. Marana, according to the account of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. 457), had a small window built at her ascetic cell for women who came to talk to her.64 Another women in the same text, Domnina, also spoke to both men and women who came to visit her hut in the garden of her mother’s house.65 Although the accounts do not explicitly mention these women narrating saints’ stories, it is safe to assume that such spiritual conversations and exhortations sometimes involved narrations of stories. In the Spiritual

Meadow we read about Maria, who narrated the story of another pious woman from Nisibis to the author John Moschos (d. 619), which is a perfect example of hagiodiegesis in written

60 For general discussions on the representations of holy women in Syriac hagiography, see Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient; Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, “Images de femmes dans l’hagiographie syriaque,” in L’hagiographie syriaque, ed. Binggeli, 201-224. 61 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 545. 62 Tim Vivian, Journeying into God: Seven Early Monastic Lives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 38. 63 Ibid., 40, 48-52. For desert mothers, see Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 253-82. 64 R.M. Price, trans., A History of the Monks of Syria by Theodoret Cyrrhus (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985), 184. 65 Ibid., 186.

21 form. 66 These hagiographical representations demonstrate that women narrated saints’ stories in monastic as well as urban contexts.

Were more women saints’ stories narrated if the audience was mixed, or consisted of only women? Rapp demonstrates, based on Greek-Byzantine examples, that women saints’ stories were not necessarily composed for the devotional life of women only; nevertheless, male authors, when addressing an audience of women, often narrated stories about other women.67 I have not encountered an example in Syriac hagiography to comply with this argument. However, since the purpose of hagiographical storytelling was generally setting examples for the listener, choosing subjects based on the demographics of the audience is expectable.

Did the gender or deeds of the hero change depending on the gender of the narrator?

Rapp, following Alice Mary Talbot, demonstrates that in monastic communities of men, for instance on Mt. Athos, women saints’ lives were read and admired, although we do not know how this quantitatively compared to male saints’ lives.68 Men certainly narrated women saints’ stories, whereas, women were generally depicted as narrating women saints’ stories, regardless of their audience, as seen in the abovementioned examples of Syncletica of Palestine and Maria in the Spiritual Meadow. There were certainly exceptions to this.

One of the few examples of women narrators of saintly men to a mixed audience comes from the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, where a young girl in Persia, after being saved

66 John Wortley, trans., Spiritual Meadow by John Moschos (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 155; J.-P. Migne, ed., “John Moschus: Pratum Spirituale,” Patrologia Graeca 87, no. 3 (1863): §clxxxv. 67 Rapp, “Female sanctity,” 321, 329-31. 68 Ibid., 321-22.

22 from drowning by Simeon, is depicted as narrating the entire miracle anecdote and her vision of Simeon to her fellow villagers.69

In the examples cited heretofore, the narrator and the holy man or woman, the subject of the story, are separated. In some cases, however, holy men and women spoke about their own holiness. As Hinterberger and Efthymiadis, among others, underline, autobiographical stories were significant components of the late antique Christian literature.70 Many desert fathers and ecclesiasts were written about as being compelled to narrate their own stories and experiences to the audiences. Speaking about oneself

(periautologia) was generally held in low esteem in monastic literature, except for the circumstances in which it brings a benefit to the listener, is about revealing a truth, or it serves some other higher purpose. 71 Hagiographical literature indicates that in certain cases, holy men and women spoke about their own sanctity, their deeds, and certain events they experienced, for the benefit of the audience. In non-autobiographical hagiography, also, there is information about such narrations. For example, the author of the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite states:

Now about the visions and revelations which were shown to the pious and holy Mar Simeon by God through the Holy Spirit, no one can describe or narrate them. He was very

69 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 153-55 §73. 70 Martin Hinterberger, “Autobiography and hagiography in Byzantium,” Symbolae Osloenses 75 (2000): 148; Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Two Gregories and three genres: Autobiography, autohagiography and hagiography,” in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, eds. Jostein Børtnes and Thomas Hӓgg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2006), 246-56. For an extensive discussion on the first-person narratives in ancient spiritual literature, including Christian hagiography, see Turner, Truthfulness, 111-45. For the “rhetorical presence” of the author, see Georgia Frank, “Miracles, monks, and monuments: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto as pilgrims’ tales,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden; Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998), 494-6. 71 For the self-perception vs. the external perception of the saint, see Turner, Truthfulness, 84- 108.

circumspect and was afraid to recount them before men lest either someone would think he spoke boastfully and so suffer loss, or someone might strongly give credence to them and think him more than what he was. For this reason, he restrained himself from recounting visions and revelations. To those who served him, however, he sometimes spoke openly and informed them. But he commanded them that they were not to divulge or tell anyone while he lived, lest it were to be thought that the only ones who praised him were those who served him. Furthermore, he did not tell everyone who served him but only those whom he loved and trusted.72

The author, with the above pericope, is certainly creating a hierarchy in the transmission of information about Simeon’s pious deeds, claiming legitimacy, veracity, and value for his account. The paragraph gives us a glimpse into the late antique world of

Syriac asceticism: Holy men and women recounted their visions to their disciples and other audiences; and sometimes this was perceived as a boastful activity. Some holy men, however, were less conscious about appearing to be boastful. In the following example,

Simeon of Bēth Arshām (d. 540) is in the parish church, speaking about his holiness to the audience:

And so also he even delivered an exposition in the chancel in the churches of all the peoples to whom he went; and on this account he would declare and say to us with tears, “In this matter I recognized clearly that God had visited me and strengthened me, and that he had not withheld his grace and his mercy from me.”73

72 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 125 (§40). Note that the author also says that Simeon commanded his disciples not to speak or relate his toil and afflictions to strangers. Doran, “Syriac Life,” 130 (§46), 134 (§53). Reticence to talk to visitors under certain circumstances in the context of the Egyptian monasticism is analyzed by Burton-Christie in “Listening,” 207, 217. 73 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 155.

Later hagiographical literature also informs us about holy men and women narrating their own stories and sanctity, such as Theodore of Sykeon (seventh c.) in his

Life.74 From the Egyptian desert, the ascetic Copres, too, narrates miracle stories of his master and of himself.75 Some of these autobiographical narratives have been preserved in writing. Nicholas of Sinai (ninth c.), for example, while re-writing the Life of Onouphrios, kept the first-person narrative of the holy man. So did the author of the Life of Nikon the

Metanoeite (tenth c.), who was narrating his life story on his death bed.76 As mentioned previously, the first-person narrative was a rhetorical choice of many authors to give historicity to their accounts. Nevertheless, it is likely that some ascetics, upon request, or on their own initiative, narrated their own stories, and explained their own sanctity. Such

“requests” posited at holy men and women to speak about their lives and pious deeds merit further attention.

Hagiographical interviews

Hagiographical interviews constitute an important sub-category of hagiodiegesis.

Hagiographers frequently mention visiting holy men/women, or their disciples, to gather information about the life and spiritual deeds of their subjects.77 “Interviewing” monks and ascetics for the purpose of hagiographical writing was a significant practice that gave impetus to both hagiodiegesis and hagiography. Wortley states that Athanasius of

74 Dawes and Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints, 102 (§22). 75 Norman Russell, trans., The Lives of the Desert Fathers (London; Mowbray; Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 82. 76 Hinterberger, “Autobiography and hagiography,” 148-9. 77 For a general overview, see Binggeli, “Collections of edifying stories,” 143-159.

Alexandria (d. 373) possibly interviewed Abba Serapion of Thimus and other monks at his palace to gather information about his hagiographical subject, St. Antony.78 The author of the History of the Monks of Egypt (fifth c.) informs his readers that he took a tour in the

Egyptian desert and talked to the fathers at their cells or monasteries.79 Palladius (d. 430) also “saw or heard about” his subjects in Egypt in the process of writing the Lausiac

History. 80 Cyril of Scythopolis (sixth c.) interviewed monks for the biographies he authored. 81 John of Ephesus, too, numerous times emphasizes how he interrogated, sometimes begged, holy men and women to gather information on their life and conduct.

In the absence of the saint him/herself, he spoke to their disciples.82

Often disciples themselves spent great effort to gather as much information as possible about holy men’s lives and deeds. For example, in the Life of the Man of God the hagiographer reports: “Now this narrative about the Man of God was publicly proclaimed by that custodian who was the friend of the blessed one. It was also written down by him for a record. For he took care and interrogated the saint with oaths and curses and [the saint] made known to him all of his former exalted life and his later abased life and did not conceal anything from him.”83 Many of these and such statements, despite sometimes being rhetorical tools to claim historicity, point to the practice of actively gathering information about saints and ascetics, and interrogating them about their lives and deeds.

78 Wortley, “Genre of the spiritually beneficial tale,” 74. 79 Ibidem. 80 Ibid., 75. 81 Kalogeras, “Role of the audience,” 154, 158; Turner, Truthfulness, 115-119, 85-86. 82 Brooks, “Eastern Saints,” 6, 542, 545. 83 Doran, “Man of God,” 25.

The hagiographical interviews should be distinguished as a different category under hagiodiegesis. Although from the perspective of narrators they might have constituted regular narrative sessions, they were probably different than usual storytelling sessions in multiple ways. The format, language, length, and content of these sessions are only speculative. Yet, one can assume that in such interview sessions the narration of the story might have taken longer than usual; the auditor possibly asked certain questions (and therefore the plot line might be altered), used mnemonic devices for taking notes, and modified the narrative before putting it down to writing.84 Hagiographical interviews, thus, point to the co-authorship of the narrator and the recorder. The latter often becomes our hagiographer, while the former’s authorship is generally neglected. 85 Moreover, hagiographical interviews often involved pilgrimage or other kinds of traveling, which adds an additional dimension of movement, spatial relocation and re-imagination to the process of authorship.86

Although the interviews were held for the purpose of writing and narrating the stories of saints to physically or temporally remote audiences, they are inseparable from the spiritual journeys and developments of the interviewers.87 In this aspect, the interview

84 In the way that they were active listening sessions, hagiographical interviews were similar to the transmission of the Oral Law and halakha in Rabbinic disciple circles; Alexei Siverstev, Households, Sects and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), 9-12; David Goodblatt, “Rabbinic academic institutions in Sasanian Babylonia,” PhD diss. (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1972), esp. 95-139. They were also comparable to the samāꜤ (lit. “listening”) tradition in Islam, where a single scholar or a group of them listen to a master of the ṣunna, tradition of Muhammad, in order to memorize, record, and transmit that knowledge. James Robson, “Ḥadīth,” in EI2. Listening sessions in the hagiographical context, however, were probably less structured, and had less of a scholarly connotation. 85 For the authorship of the saint, see Turner, Truthfulness, 111-145. 86 Frank, “Miracles,” 487-8. 87 Turner, Truthfulness, 117-120.

27 sessions can be contextualized within the broader discourse of dialogue, debate, and truth- seeking in late antique Christianity.88 In Christian hagiography there are many episodes in which people question holy men and women, or their disciples, for seeking further information or interpretation about events, practices of piety, dreams, or scriptures. In the

Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, for example, two disciples throw themselves down before the saint, and implore and beseech him to speak to them about a miracle he had performed, and about the prayers he had recited during it.89 Sometimes the holy man was the one who interrogates. Simeon the Stylite, his hagiographer says, was questioning learned men to interpret his prophetic dreams:

He was always quizzing experts in the scriptures to learn from them about the life-styles of these two powerful athletes, Moses and Elijah. Now one said by humility, another by love, another zeal for God – everyone had his own opinion. So, he asked everyone in order to learn from everyone; it was not demeaning to that importance and that spiritual wisdom that it humble itself and ask even the least what manner of life was suitable to the service of his master. When he learnt all these things from everybody and he had been instructed in the holy scriptures which were read before him, the saint began to fix them all in his own self.”90

The mentions of interviews and questionings in hagiography indicate the inquisitive nature of listening to hagiographical stories for Christian audiences in antiquity, the general

88 Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 14, 23-38. Prominent examples of questioning holy men come from the Egyptian monastic literature, where disciples or visitors of holy men search “for meaning unfolding within the context of oral discourse,” Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 199, 213-19; Hezser, “Apophthegmata,” 458-63. Note that Burton-Christie says monks sometimes preferred to tell stories instead of “engaging in discursive reflection on complex theological questions,” which underlines the intricate interplay between questioning, interviewing, and storytelling. Burton- Christie, “Listening,” 203. 89 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 157-58 (§76). 90 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 128 (§44).

28 curiosity for details of stories, and the participation of audiences in oral performances, if occasional. Sometimes audiences expressed hesitation, doubts, and criticism through such questioning sessions. For example, in the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, the author says,

“perhaps someone will say, ‘what made it necessary or required that he mount on a pillar?

Could he not please our Lord on the ground or at most in that corner?’”91

Averil Cameron and Stephanos Efthymiadis exquisitely demonstrate the dialectic nature of Christian discourse in late antiquity, arguing that dialogue constituted a significant tool in Christian discourse, serving polemics, apologetics, exegesis, philosophical inquiries, and instruction.92 Hagiography complies with their observations, and it highlights that questioning, dialogue, and debates not only facilitated conversation between theologically opposing parties, but also helped non-opposing co-religionists seek truth and information for personal, spiritual development. We should put this observation in dialogue with Jack Tannous’ argument that the majority of the Christian population in late antiquity and the Middle Ages was not theologically literate enough to participate in intricate theological debates.93 Theological literacy and debate was one of the many aspects of Christian knowledge, and hagiography demonstrates that even though “simple believers”94 were not always equipped to debate about Christology, they constantly and actively engaged with the biblical and post-biblical history through their knowledge of

91 Doran, “Syriac Life,” 179 (§111). 92 Cameron, Dialoguing, 9-11, 18-19, 23-27, 35, 36, et passim; Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Questions and answers,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, eds. Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 47-62. 93 Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 15-45, et passim. 94 For this term, see ibid., 46ff.

29 biblical and hagiographical stories. Details of such stories mattered, and people inquired about them.

Cameron and Efthymiadis underline the importance of the genre of erotapokriseis

(question-and-answer, Syr. shūalā wa-pūnayā) in understanding late antique Christian dialectic discourse.95 The question-and-answer genre’s function in scriptural exegesis and the formation of the canon law has also been studied.96 For Christian hagiography, it is difficult to say whether a question-and-answer session preceded the prose version of a story. Moreover, the preserved question-and-answer texts were used as pedagogical tools, and they do not necessarily reflect actual verbal exchanges.97 Nevertheless, hagiographers’ emphases on questioning, inquiring, and interrogating while collecting information about the subjects of their texts make it possible to assume that in certain cases they had a questioning session with saints or their disciples, however the sessions might have been phrased, which got lost in the process of composing the “published,” prose version of the story.

My last example, which demonstrates the continuity and function of hagiographical interviews in the Middle Ages, comes from Syriac historiography.98 Michael the Syrian (d.

95 Cameron, Dialoguing, 20, 34-35, 45-49, 56; Efthymiadis, “Questions,” 49-55, 96 Bas ter Haar Romeny, “Question-and-answer collections in Syriac literature,” in Erotapokriseis: Early Christian Question-and-Answer Literature in Context. Proceedings of the Utrecht Colloquium, 13-14 October 2003, eds. A. Volgers and C. Zamagni, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology 37 (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 145-63; Herman Teule, “Jacob of Edessa and canon law,” in Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day, ed. Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 83-100. 97 Although some of them probably partially preserved real conversations and questions, as seen in the questions directed at Anastasius of Sinai (eighth c.) preserved by his disciples. Efthymiadis, “Questions,” 51-52. 98 For hagiography as a significant component of ecclesiastical historiography, see Kirsopp Lake, trans., Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History, Books I-V, LOEB Classical Library 153 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), §xvi; Glenn Chesnut, The First Christian Histories: Eusebius,

1199) informs the readers that John of Mardin (d. 1165) renovated numerous churches and monasteries in northern Mesopotamia in the twelfth century, while reviving the hagiographical traditions, which had been mostly circulating orally:

[W]e could never find out when, how and by whom it [the Monastery of Mar Hananya] was built nor the name of the saint by whose name it was (first) known and proclaimed before Bishop Hananya - as this has happened to many monasteries whose stories of the saints on whose names they were built (have been lost). As (for example) that of the holy Mar Behnam, who now in our days is doing miracles and mighty works (just) as in the time of the apostles, to all those who come to him in faith. There is no story at all about him except only that which is told in oral tradition - and one as it pleases him can tell it in an elaborate or in a concise (way). So, this is the reason why we remembered these monasteries [the ones restored by John of Mardin in the twelfth century], the origin of their building and the names of the saints who built on the resting places of the saints, (although), indeed, it would be proper that there ought to be a special story for each monastery.99

This is a great testimony to multiple versions of saints’ stories circulating in the oral tradition, and the concern to find and preserve the reliable accounts. The example shows that hagiographical interviews were sometimes carried out a long time after the saints’ lifetime, and oral tradition was utilized as an archive of knowledge.

The analysis of a limited corpus of Greek and Syriac hagiographical texts demonstrates the various narrators, audiences, and contexts of the practice of

Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Evagrius (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1977), 95-97; Felice Lifshitz, “Beyond positivism and genre: ‘Hagiographical’ texts as historical narrative,” Viator 25 (1996): 95-114; G. W. Trompf, Early Christian Historiography. Narratives of Retributive Justice (London; New York: Continuum, 2000), 109-142. For Syriac hagiography in historiographical works, see Brock, “Syriac hagiography,” 263. 99 Arthur Vööbus, trans., “Michael the Great: About Mor Yuhannon of Marde,” in The Synodicon in the West Syrian Tradition, ed. Arthur Vööbus (Secrétariat du CSCO, 1976), 2:207.

31 hagiodiegesis. Saints’ stories were orally narrated by monks, ascetics, pilgrims, men and women, in monastic and urban contexts. These performative-auditory experiences were mostly unstructured, with some significant exceptions. This oral milieu was highlighted and punctuated by instances of texts, which scholars collect under the rubric of hagiography. Despite our partial reconstruction of it, the practice of hagiographical storytelling greatly impacted cultural and literary transmission across geographical, temporal, and confessional boundaries. In the rest of this dissertation I focus on a particular confessional boundary, namely, the one that ostensibly separates Christianity and Islam in the early Middle Ages.

2. Narration and transmission in early Islam

For studying the transmission of saints’ stories into early Islam,100 modern scholarship often points at two contexts: the life and prophetic career of Muhammad in the Ḥijāz, and the local contexts out of the Ḥijāz after the Islamic conquests in the seventh and eighth

100 I follow Fred Donner in his argument that Islamic doctrines mostly began to take shape as a distinct religious system as a result of the imperial impetus particularly under ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (d. 705), and use the term “formative period of Islam,” interchangeably with “early Islam,” to refer to the period between the beginning of Muhammad’s preaching and the end of the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik. Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 194ff. Aziz al-Azmeh uses the term “Paleo-Islam” instead of “early Islam” to refer to this formative period, arguing that the term “believers” that Donner uses has a dogmatic rather than chronological connotation. Aziz al- Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 358ff. Donner appears to have agreed with the usefulness of this term. Fred Donner, “Talking about Islam’s origins,” BSOAS (2018): 23. I prefer to use “early Islam” rather than “Paleo-Islam.” The use of the Greek prefix “paleo,” meaning “old, ancient,” has the connotation of a stronger chronological break between Paleo-Islam and Islam, whereas, “early” suggests a closer developmental connectivity while retaining the chronological distinction. The term “pre- theological,” used by William Graham is also a helpful term for thinking about this period. William Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam: A Reconsideration of the Sources, with Special Reference to the Divine Saying or Ḥadȋth Qudsȋ (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1977), 19.

32 centuries. There is voluminous scholarship on Muhammad’s personal connections, searching for his “informants” or “instructors,”101 and in related vein, on the sources of the

Qur’ān,102 the holy scripture of Islam, tracing intertextualities with the biblical corpus, as well as other late antique literary traditions.103 The argument that certain monotheists in the communities surrounding the Ḥijāz were instructing Muhammad on biblical themes

101 The most prominent scholarship on the so-called informants of Muhammad is: Aloys Sprenger, Das Leben und die Lehre des Mohammad: Nach Bisher Grösstentheils Unbenutzten Quellen, 3 vols. (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1869), 349ff; Richard Bell, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment (London: Macmillan & Co., 1926); Johann Fück, “Die originalitӓt des arabischen Propheten,” ZDMG 90, no. 15 (1936): 509-25; Julian Obermann, “Islamic origins: A study in background and foundation,” in The Arab Heritage, ed. J. Friedlander (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 58-120; Krisztina Szilagry, “Muhammad and the monk. The making of the Bahira legend,” JSAI 34 (2008): 169-214; Claude Gilliot, “On the origins of the informants of the prophet,” in The Hidden Origins of Islam, eds. Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R. Puin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 153-188. For other works on the historical Muhammad, see Ignác Goldziher, Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), ed. S. M. Stern, trans., C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, 2 vols. (originally: Halle: Niemeyer, 1890; translation: Aldine; Atherton; Chicago; New York: State University of New York Press, 1971); Henri Lammens, “Qoran et tradition: Comment fut composée la vie de Mahomet,” Recherches de Science Religieuse 1 (1910): 27-51; D. S. Margoliouth, Mohammed (London; Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1939); Rudi Paret, Mohammed und der Koran: Geschichte und Verkündigung des arabischen Propheten (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957); Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Michael Cook, Muhammad (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Frances Peters, “The quest of the historical Muhammad,” IJMES 23, no. 3 (1991): 291-315; Uri Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1995), Harald Motzki, ed., The Biography of Muḥammad: The Issue of the Sources (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The Origin of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (Amherst: Prometheus, 2003); Josef Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 2002); Hans Jansen, Mohammed: Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008); Tarif Khalidi, Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam across the Centuries (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Jonathan Brockopp, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: Satanic Verses in Early Islam (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 2017). 102 A.T. Welch, R. Paret, J.D. Pearson, “al-Ḳurʾān,” in EI2. 103 For two comprehensive overviews of the scholarship on the Qur’ān, see Andrew Bannister, An Oral-Formulaic Study of the Qur’an (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2014), 19-29; Devin Stewart, “Reflections on the state of the art in western qur’anic studies,” in Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur’an, eds. Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4-68.

33 and narratives, who in turn preached to his community, has been mostly discredited,104 while the scholarship dedicated to elucidating the textual connections and subtexts of the

Qur’ān has been longer-lived.105 Both of these traditions of scholarship, searching for the

104 Among the refutations are: Theodor Nöldeke, “Hatte Muḥammad christliche Lehrer?” ZDMG 12, no. 4 (1858): 699-708; Hartwig Hirschfeld, New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1902), 22; Theodor Nöldeke et al., The History of the Qur’ān, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Behn (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), 23-24. 105 G. Weil, The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud or Biblical Legends of the Musselmans (New York: Harper, 1846); Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorâns (Göttingen: Verlag der Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1860); idem., Neue Beitrage zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (Strassburg: APA-Philo Press, 1904); Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Islam, ed. F. M. Young (Madras, 1898; reprint: New York: Ktav, 1970); Tor Andrae, Der Ursprung der Islams und das Christentum (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1926); Josef Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1926); Alphonse Mingana, “Syriac Influence on the Style of the Kur’ān,” Bulletin of John Rylands Library 11.1 (1927): 77-98; K. Ahrens, “Christiches im Qoran,” ZDMG 84 (1930): 15-68, 148-90; Margoliouth, Mohammed, esp. 123-148; Arthur Jeffery, Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’ān: The Old Codicies (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1937); idem., The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ān (Baroda, India: Oriental Institute, 1938); idem., The Qur’ān as Scripture (New York: Russell F. Moore Co. Inc., 1952); Edmund Beck, “Les Houris du Coran et Ephrem le syrien,” Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicaine des Études Orientales du Caire 6 (1959-1961), 405-8; Heinrich Speyer, Die biblischen Erzӓhlungen im Qoran (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961); G. Lüling, Über den Ur-Qur’ān: Ansӓtze zur Rekonstruktion vorislamischer christlicher Strophenlieder im Qur’ān (Erlangen: Lüling, 1974); Yūsuf Durra al-Ḥaddād, al-Injīl fī-l-qur’ān (Jounieh: Librairie Pauliste, 1982); Suleiman Mourad, “On the qur’ānic stories about Mary and Jesus,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 13-24; Christoph Luxenberg, Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000); Suleiman Mourad, “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam: The origin of the Palm Tree story concerning Mary and Jesus in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Qur’ān,” Oriens Christianus 86 (2002): 206-216; Wilhelm Maria Maas, “Der Koran – ein christliches Lektionar?,” Islam (2004): 27-32; Federico Corriente, “On a proposal for a ‘Syro-Aramaic’ reading of the Qur’ān,” Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 1 (2004): 305-314; John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, frw. Andrew Rippin (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2004, originally Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Gabriel Sawma, The Qur’ān: Misinterpreted, Mistranslated, and Misread. The Aramaic Language of the Qur’ān (Plainsboro, NJ: GMS, 2006); Sidney Griffith, “Syriacisms in the Arabic Qur’ān: Who were those who said ‘Allah is third of three’” in A Word Fitly Spoken: Studies in Medieval Exegeses of the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’ān, eds. Meir Bar-Asher, Simon Hopkins, Sarah Stroumsa and Bruno Chiesa (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 2007), 83-110; Daniel King, “A Christian Qur’ān? A study in the Syriac background to the language of the Qur’ān as presented in the work of Christoph Luxenberg,” Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture 3 (2009): 44-71; Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (London; New York: Routledge, 2010); John Jandora, The Latent Trace of Islamic Origins: Midian’s Legacy in Mecca’s Moral Awakening (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012); Emran Elbadawi, The Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (New York; London: Routledge, 2013); Theodor Nöldeke et al., History of the Qur’ān;

34 origins of Islam, or “stepping stones” as Crone and Cook phrase it,106 have been argued against for their methodological assumptions. The former, in Angelika Neuwirth’s words,

“grossly overstated his [Muhammad’s] personal function in the genesis of the Qur’ān,” while the latter, especially the “revisionist scholars” preceded by John Wansbrough, mostly diminish Muhammad and his community’s “role in the emergence of the new religion.”107

In broader terms this track of scholarship has been criticized for its connotations of the emergence of Islam as a sectarian movement within a broader (and superior) biblical

(Jewish and Christian) tradition. Crone and Cook, for example, presented the early Islamic movement as a pastiche of Jewish (and later Christian) messianism, Abrahamic monotheism, and Samaritan scripturalism,108 coming out of a “so religiously parvenue a nation.”109 The refutations to their work emphasize Islam’s place in late antiquity as a tradition with its historically contingent development, semiotics and doctrines, on a par with the other religions of the eastern Mediterranean.

As Aziz al-Azmeh extensively argues, the emergence of Islam was a culmination of a religio-cultural commonwealth of late antiquity that had its roots in Hellenism and semitic prophetology. 110 He emphasizes that numerous praxes, modes of artistic and literary expression, and theological concepts of what he calls the Paleo-Islamic era

Holger Zellentin, The Qur’ān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolarum as a Point of Departure (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 106 Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 19. 107 Angelika Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology: Qur’ānic textual politics of staging, penetrating and finally eclipsing biblical tradition,” in Qur’ānic Studies Today, eds. Angelika Neuwirth and Michael Sells (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 181-2. 108 Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 1-10, 15-16. 109 Ibid., 16. 110 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 40-6, 248ff.

35 demonstrated continuities with the Jewish, Christian, and pagan milieu of Arabia in late antiquity; therefore, the so-called “informants” of Muhammad, and the literary “sources” of the Qur’ān, are not necessary conceptual middle-steps in the process of the emergence of Islam. 111 Nevertheless, the question of the dynamics of interreligious encounters, interaction, and transmission in early Islam awaits further elaboration. More than what

Islam “appropriated” or “misappropriated,” 112 a close study of how early Islamic communities used, reinterpreted and recontextualized the continued traditions for their identity formation processes will yield results that contribute to our understanding of late antiquity in general, and of particular concepts such as prophecy, community formation, and scripture. And for this we should turn to the Qur’ān and Muhammad again, albeit with different methodologies and theoretical frameworks.

There is significant research on the oral aspects of the Qur’ān, focusing on a range of themes, from structural and linguistic features to phonetics and recitation. 113 The majority of them, however, do not have a substantial discussion on Muhammad as its reciter. A number of works have applied literary analysis to certain sūras (independent text

111 Ibid., 493ff. 112 Appropriation is a widely used problematic term, which I refrain from using in this dissertation. I discuss different modes of cultural/religious transmission between Christianity and Islam below. 113 Rudi Paret, Der Koran, Kommentar und Konkordanz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971); Alford Welch, “Formulaic features of the punishment stories,” in Literary Structures of Religious Meaning in the Qur’ān, ed. Issa J. Boullata (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), 77-116; Alan Dundes, Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur’an (Lanham; Boulder; New York; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Gregor Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Read, trans. Shawkat M. Toorawa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 30ff; Andrew Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study; Angelika Neuwirth, Scripture, Poetry and the Making of a Community: Reading the Qur’an as a Literary Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Hussein Abdul-Raof, New Horizons in Qur’anic Linguistics: A Syntactic, Semantics and Stylistic Analysis (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018).

36 units, often translated as “chapters”)114 of the Qur’ān to explore the orality of the text with a narrower focus. However, analyzing particular narratives in isolation, or groups of narratives based on the name of their hero or the major connecting themes, often leads to a limited understanding of Muhammad’s public speech. For example, A. H. Johns analyzes the dialogues in sūrat yūsuf, and argues that stylistic devices, such as naturalistic expressions and turns of phrase, “provide for the listener clues as to who is speaking” in the Qur’ān115 This extensive examination of the sūra, demonstrating how the qur’ānic rhetoric and linguistic features alter depending on which character is speaking in the narrative, is illuminating for conceptualizing the performative character of qur’ānic recitation. Nevertheless, Johns does not comment on Muhammad’s public speech. In fact, he explicitly points out that the oral milieu of the earliest recitations of the Qur’ān is inaccessible to us.116 Although this is certainly true, we can attempt at developing an approximate understanding of this milieu in light of the broader information that is available about public speech and proclamation in the late antique eastern Mediterranean.

Michael Zwettler analyzes sūrat al-shuʿarā’ and shows how some linguistic features of this qur’ānic chapter comply with the conventions of poetry and soothsaying in

Arabia in antiquity, indicating the oral performative character of the qur’ānic discourse.117

114 A.T. Welch, “Sūra,” in EI2. sūras were the chief medium of Muhammad’s proclamation, which became “chapters” of the qur’ānic muṣḥaf after the redaction process. Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 183. 115 Q12; A.H. Johns, “The quranic presentation of the Joseph story: Naturalistic or formulaic language?” in Approaches to the Qur’ān, eds. G. R. Hawting and Abdul-Kader A. Shareef (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 42ff. 116 Ibid., 67-68. 117 Q26; Michael Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto: The sūra of ‘The Poets’ and the qur’ānic foundations of prophetic authority,” in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, ed. James Kugel (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 75-119.

Griffith’s recent article, in which he analyzes the prophetology developed in this sūra,118 is an invaluable complement to Zwettler’s work in elucidating phraseology and narratology of the Qur’ān. Yet, being restricted to one sūra, these works do not provide a comprehensive picture for Muhammad’s public speech. In similar vein, Hosn Abboud meticulously analyzes the narrative structure and phraseology of narratives about Mary,119 and Marianna Klar presents a detailed study of the narrative structure of sūrat al-kahf.120

Yet, these works only briefly mention the storytelling aspect of the narratives they analyze.121 Analysis of the oral aspects of a text only partly elucidates its reciter. Therefore, a social-historical analysis of Muhammad’s public speech, preaching, and storytelling remains to be a lacuna in scholarship.

Navid Kermani’s article is another solid attempt in this direction, in which he argues that the aesthetic reception of Qur’ān recitals became a significant cultural memory and denominator of identity for Muslim communities.122 Kermani discusses reports about the pleasing and awe-inspiring nature of Qur’ān recital, a manifestation of its miraculous language (iʿjāz), and about conversions, particularly of poets, as a result of these recitals.

Aziz al-Azmeh also emphasizes the beatific audition of the Qur’ān as one of the fundamental features of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation. 123 As Kermani points out,

118 Griffith, “Sunna of our messengers.” 119 Hosn Abboud, Mary in the Qur’an: A Literary Reading, fwd. Angelika Neuwirth (London; New York: Routledge, 2014), 38ff. 120 Marianna Klar, “Re-examining textual boundaries: Towards a form-critical sūrat al-kahf,” in Islamic Studies Today: Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin, eds. Majid Daneshgar and Walid A. Saleh (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017), 215-238. 121 Abboud, Mary in the Qur’an, 50-1; Klar, “Re-examining,” 215-6. 122 Navid Kermani, “The aesthetic reception of the Qur’ān as reflected in early Muslim history,” in Literary Structures, ed. Boullata, 255-76. 123 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 437ff.

38 however, the reports about the aesthetic delivery of the Qur’ān rarely appear in early literary works, and they were likely brought to fore when the doctrine of iʿjāz was developed starting from the ninth century.124 Therefore, although the reports portray the earliest recitals of the Qur’ān as aesthetic experiences, they are not reliable sources in reconstructing the perception and reception of Muhammad’s public speech.

Neuwirth in a number of works shows the development of some qur’ānic narratives, with an intratextual, diachronic reading of sūras that iterate different versions of the same stories, such as those of Moses, the Golden Calf, Mary, and Jesus.125 Neuwirth connects these variant narrations to the ongoing communication between Muhammad and his audience, and his experiences that shaped this process. Similarly, Michael Sells demonstrates the development of the Moses narrative both within particular sūras and across the Qur’ān.126 Neuwirth and Sells’ works are immensely important starting points to any study of Muhammad’s public speech.

How does one reconstruct Muhammad’s public speech? A reading of the Qur’ān based on sīra (biography, particularly of Muhammad) traditions is potentially misleading, since the majority of biographical information about Muhammad’s life comes from later literary historiographical and exegetical traditions, through which medieval historians and

124 Kermani, “Aesthetic reception of the Qur’ān,” 268-72; also see K. Abu Deeb, “Literary criticism,” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. Julia Ashtiany, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 360-66. 125 Neuwirth, Scripture, 277ff; idem., Koran, 394ff; idem., “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 183; also see idem., Studien zur Komposition der mekkanischen Suren (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). 126 Micahel Sells, “The casting: A close hearing of sūra 20:1-79,” in Qur’ānic Studies Today, eds. Neuwirth and Sells, 124-77.

39 theologians, scholars argue, created a historical frame for the qur’ānic revelation.127 In other words, this group of scholars argue that biography was a later-created, therefore unreliable, tool with a purpose of creating a qur’ānic chronology which is not inherently visible in the text of the Qur’ān itself. Yet, as Zwettler finely expresses, “an understanding of the internal dynamics of qur’ānic discourse might best be based, whenever possible and feasible, upon analytic study of whole sūras, with some concern for their approximate place in the historical scheme of unfolding revelation and in the discernible evolution and crystallization of qur’ānic patterns of thought, perception, and expression over the course of the Prophet’s career.”128 For the purposes of the analyses in this project, it is a must to conceptualize Muhammad’s ongoing communication with the community around him during his life time, which is partially reconstructable through a diachronic reading of the content of the Qur’ān, together with the sīra and other extra-qur’ānic literary material.

Trying to reconstruct a historical Muhammad is an endeavor with numerous restraints, all

127 sīra here referring to both works that are entitled sīra, and biographical material about Muhammad’s life in other, non-biographical literature. For an overview of the term, see Raven, “Sīra,” in EI2; Reynolds, Qur’ān in Its Biblical Subtext, 3ff. Other than Gabriel Reynolds, some of the prominent proponents of this school of thought and their relevant works are: Stephen Shoemaker, Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Elbadawi, The Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions; Carlos Segovia, The Quranic Noah and the Making of the Islamic Prophet: Study of Intertextuality and Religious Identity Formation in Late Antiquity (Berlin; Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2015). For qur’ānic exegesis and asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions of revelation), see Andrew Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2; idem., “The exegetical genre ‘asbāb al-nuzūl’: A bibliographical and terminological survey,” BSOAS 48 (1985): 1-15; idem, “The function of ‘asbāb al-nuzūl’ in qur’ānic exegesis,” BSOAS 51 (1988): 1-20. 128 Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 75. For the utility in attempting to reconstruct the historical Muhammad in light of extra-qur’ānic material, also see Andreas Görke, “Prospects and limits in the study of the historical Muḥammad,” in The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honor of Harald Motzki, eds. Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, et al. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 140; Montgomery Watt, “The materials used by Ibn Isḥāq,” in Historians of the Middle East, eds. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 24-28.

40 of which I acknowledge.129 I do, however, see the utility of such an analysis, to the extent possible.

Tarif Khalidi’s discussion of Muhammad in the Qur’ān is another significant contribution to the field.130 He identifies four voices in the Qur’ān, namely, visionary, narrative, homiletic/legal and situative, which are important in conceptualizing the multifaceted nature of Muhammad’s public image.131 Yet, Khalidi does not discuss these modes of public speech in length. His discussion involves the qur’ānic representation of human nature;132 qur’ānic prophetology in its broad outlines;133 what the Qur’ān says

Muhammad is not;134 and the qur’ānic characterization of Muhammad’s moral virtues, his human nature, and his prophetic call. 135 All of these are significant components of

Muhammad’s qur’ānic persona. However, Khalidi’s discussion leaves many questions unanswered in terms of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation, other types of public speech, and changing perceptions of his audiences. For example, his presentation of the qur’ānic verses in which the Qur’ān says Muhammad is not a poet, soothsayer, or possessed needs more elaboration, since these verses suggest that Muhammad’s speech must have sometimes sounded similar to preaching of poets, soothsayers and storytellers in the community.

129 F. Buhl, et al. “Muḥammad,” in EI2; Görke, “Prospects and limits,” 137-151. Also see Chase Robinson, “History and heilsgeschichte in early Islam: some observations on prophetic history and biography,” in History and Religion, eds. Bernd-Christian Otto, Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 119-50. 130 Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 21-35. 131 Ibid., 22-24. 132 Ibid., 21-22. 133 Ibid., 25-26. 134 Ibid., 27-31. 135 Ibid., 31-35.

Moreover, Khalidi presents a thematic reading of the Qur’ān, without paying much attention to the sitz im leben of the verses he cites, their chronologies relative to

Muhammad’s career, or the broader content of the Qur’ān.

I underline the methodological choice of prioritizing the content – as opposed to lexical forms – of the Qur’ān to reconstruct Muhammad’s public speech. The perils of the lack of this approach is seen in one of the most recent contributions to the topic, namely,

Lyall Armstrong’s discussion of Muhammad as a storyteller.136 His analysis of storytellers

(quṣṣāṣ) is shaped by the use of the word qaṣṣa (inf.: qaṣaṣ, nomen agentis: qāṣṣ) “to recount, relate, report.”137 This approach methodologically excludes many reports that give information about Muhammad as a storyteller, simply due to the absence of the word in a report. Not every storytelling session was designated as qaṣaṣ in literature, and not everybody who narrated stories was referred to as a qāṣṣ.138 Moreover, as seen in the content of the Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ wal-mudhakkirīn compiled by Ibn al-Jawzī (twelfth c.), even if somebody is referred to as a qāṣṣ, he may not have been a narrator of stories technically speaking.139 Ibn al-Jawzī gives brief excerpts from the preaching of 75 quṣṣāṣ, and none

136 Lyall Armstrong, The Quṣṣāṣ of Early Islam (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 38, 191-4, 285-6. 137 Ibid., 7-8; C. Pellat, “Ḳāṣṣ,” in EI2. For quṣṣāṣ as public preachers who promoted religious devotion, elaborated on religious concepts and interpreted the Qur’ān, see Charles Pellat, Le Milieu Baṣrien et la Formation de Ǧāḥiẓ (Paris: Librarie d’Amérue et d’Orient, 1953), 82, 89, 94- 99, 101,108-16, 145; Wansbrough, Qur’ānic Studies; 122ff; Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 213-6; Jonathan Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Ignác Goldziher, Schools of Koranic Commentators, ed. and trans. Wolfgang H. Behn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 36-8; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 76-111. 138 Johannes Pedersen, “Islamic preacher: wā’iẓ, mudhakkir, qāṣṣ,” in Ignác Goldziher Memorial Volume I, eds. S. Löwinger and J. Somogyi (Budapest, 1948), 226-51; Jonathan Berkey, “Audience and authority in medieval Islam: The case of popular preachers,” in Charisma and Religious Authority: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Preaching, eds. Katherine Jansen and Miri Rubin (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 107-8; 139 For qaṣaṣ as “religious narration,” see Merlin Swartz, Ibn al-Jawzī’s kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ wal- mudhakkirīn [The Book of Storytellers and Admonishers], ed. and trans. idem. (Beirut: Dar el-

42 of them involves a narrative.140 Some of these reports might have been phrased this way due to later controversies between storytellers, scholars of ḥadīth (traditions about sayings and pious deeds of Muhammad),141 and exegetes on the correct sources of historical and theological knowledge. 142 Proponents of storytellers, due to these controversies and rivalries, might have portrayed Muhammad explicitly as a storyteller. This was the case for

Ibn al-Jawzī, who was a preacher himself.143 Thus, an analysis based on terminology is restrictive. Moreover, although Armstrong gives an account of the use of these words in the Qur’ān,144 he does not discuss Muhammad’s reception as a storyteller through the content of his qur’ānic proclamation. The latter is crucial for our understanding of

Muhammad as a transmitter and narrator of hagiographical stories, as I will demonstrate extensively in Chapter 1.

The second context of literary and cultural transmission into Islam, namely, the places beyond the Ḥijāz which were administratively incorporated into the Islamic territory

Machreq Éditeurs, 1969), 95. For the methodological difficulty of focusing on this word, see Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 9-10; also pointed out in Pamela Klasova, “Review: Lyall Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ in Early Islam,” al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 190-96. 140 Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 126-169; all of the excerpts are brief exhortations, but in the rest of the book, when Ibn al-Jawzī discusses the various aspects of storytelling it is implied that qaṣaṣ involved narrating stories. 141 Robson, “Ḥadīth,” EI2. 142 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 5-6, 112-120, 194; Berkey, “Auidence and authority,” 108-10. For ḥadīth collectors and scholars, the essential groundworks are Herbert Berg, The Development of Exegesis in Early Islam: The Authenticity of Muslim Literature from the formative Period (Richmond: Curzon, 2000); Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009); Harald Motzki, Analyzing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghazi Hadith (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), esp. 138ff; idem., The Origin of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools, trans. Marion Katz (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012); Christopher Melchert, Hadith, Piety, and Law: Selected Studies (Atlanta, GA: Lockwood, 2015); also see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 17ff. 143 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 3; Merlin Swartz, “Introduction,” in Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 15-40. 144 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 33-38.

43 after the conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries, has been explored to a limited extent. Michael Morony’s Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, Chase Robinson’s Empire and

Elites after the Muslim Conquest, Nancy Khalek’s Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, and Magad Mikhail’s From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt are among the works that demonstrate, to varying degrees, how the transmission of cultural symbols was facilitated, leading to reorientations and reinterpretations of these symbols for emerging Muslim communities on a local basis.145 Morony, for example, analyzes “cultural osmosis” in terms of continuity and change, and points to cultural, administrative, and religious continuities from pre-Islamic to Islamic Iraq. His theorization of transmission is very helpful,146 with his discussions of the actual mechanisms of transmission that fulfill the theoretical framework are restricted to administration, “ethnolinguistic categories,” and religious communities. Yet, his discussion mostly excludes the transmission of narratives or stories that reinforce the sustenance of these categories.

Nancy Khalek, focusing on the historiography of Damascus in Syria, demonstrates that Ghassanids, the pre-Islamic Christian Arab allies of Byzantium, “became (among other things) historians who transmitted narratives pertinent to their Christian past while beginning to invest in an Islamic future” after the Islamic conquests in the seventh century.147 Through the context of their service as scholars, governors, court poets, scribes,

145 Michael Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Chase Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Nancy Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest; Magad Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 146 Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 6ff. See particularly his review of the concepts of selectivity, receptivity and reinforcement in cultural transmission. 147 Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 44.

44 etc., they mobilized their memory and knowledge of Christian culture and literature into building a Syrian-Muslim identity.148 Khalek also points to monks translating biblical, hagiographical, exhortative, and liturgical literature from Greek and Syriac to Arabic as a vehicle of transmission. 149 These discussions of local examples of transmission are indispensable starting points for understanding the dynamics and facilitators of transmission into early Islam.

Jack Tannous’ monograph, the Making of the Medieval Middle East, with its sweeping geographical and chronological focus has combined these two approaches to look into the shared world of Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages. His presentation of the world of “simple believers” on both the Christian and the Muslim side is immensely helpful in thinking about the interconfessional interactions and transmissions in a milieu in which religious knowledge, interest, and practice was multifaceted, falling on a broad spectrum of theological literacy. Tannous’ focus on theological knowledge, on the other hand, leaves broad space for conversation in his work. Certainly, the majority of believers,

Christian and Muslim, had limited interest in or grasp of theological positions and doctrines. And certainly, people were more involved in the major tenets of religious practice, to the degree that the latter contributed to their lives (for community building, safety, health, salvation, etc.). Yet, between theology and practice, there is a very important component of the religion equation. That is, memory and narrative. The biblical history, stories of ancestors, important events of the past, all help individuals and communities

148 Khalek demonstrates, for example, how particular rhetorical tropes relating to asceticism and eschatology were transmitted from the Christian tradition to Islam in the context of Syria through local, scholarly families, in ibid., 45-52. I will have a discussion of these family books or “notes” on asceticism and piety below. 149 Ibid., 55-58.

45 make meaning and connect to a past and a future. It is at the point of memory that many

“simple believers” identified, debated, negotiated, accepted or rejected each other.

Building upon the foundational scholarship mentioned heretofore, I situate the earliest Islamic community within the oral hagiographical milieu of the eastern

Mediterranean and analyze the mechanisms of hagiographical transmission between

Christianity and Islam through the production, narration, circulation, and transmission of stories. The oral nature of transmission in the early Islamic era has been widely discussed; yet, the agents and mechanisms remain understudied.150 Through a reading of the Qur’ān, as well as other early examples of Arabic literature, in the following chapters I analyze public preachers, particularly storytellers, in early Islamic communities (Muhammad being the most prominent), and their agency in the oral circulation of saints’ stories. After this, I turn to the trajectories of saints’ stories within and across Islamic literature.

3. Traveling stories

How does one determine and trace hagiographical transmission? It is a complex, multilayered process, involving transmission and translation of tropes, personas/names, and stories – the three levels of narrative transmission. Islamic tradition emerged in the context of the late antique eastern Mediterranean, a milieu in which Christian monasticism and asceticism were deeply woven into the texture of society. 151 Therefore, Islamic

150 The field owes greatly to Gregor Schoeler, whose works on the topic of orality in early Islam include, but are not limited to: “Writing and publishing: On the use and function of writing in the first centuries of Islam,” Arabica 44 (1997): 423-35; idem., Genesis of Literature in Islam; see also Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 8-13, 25ff; Hugh Kennedy, “From oral tradition to written record in Arabic genealogy,” Arabica 44 (1997): 531-44; Mourad, Early Islam, 3-6. 151 Bell, Origin of Islam, 33-63; See Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 64ff; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 159ff; Robert Hoyland, “Early Islam as a late antique

46 literature and orature were connected to the broader literary traditions of late antiquity, by partaking in a shared vocabulary of signs, symbols, and forms to present its foundation stories and holy personae. 152 There was a semiosphere, a “common pool of semiotic elements” out of which most religious communities drew terminologies to articulate their own foundation narratives.153 “Muslims” in Nancy Khalek’s words, “used, developed and expanded upon a lexicon of culture and power that was available, meaningful and very much at hand.”154 Khalek in another work demonstrates, for instance, how the ṣaḥāba

(Companions) of the Prophet Muhammad were characterized in Islamic historiography on par with martyrs and holy men in Christianity.155 In such a context, where personae, themes, topoi, and vocabulary are shared among multiple religious communities, even though many stories sound similar, and the heroes are familiar, traces of transmission are difficult to establish.

religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1053-1077; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 11-15. 152 Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community,” 22-25; Nancy Khalek, “He was tall and slender, and his virtues were numerous: Byzantine hagiographical topoi and the Companions of Muhammad in al-Azdī’s Futūḥ al Shām/Conquest of Syria,” in Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East, ed. Arietta Papaconstantinou (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 123; idem., Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 5-6, 15, 54ff. For some of the common tropes in Arabic literature, see Angelika Neuwirth et al., eds., Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic figures in Arabic Literature: Towards a Hermeneutic Approach (Beirut: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1999). For topoi and intertextuality, see Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, trans. Timothy Pogačar (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 20-23. 153 Sizgorich, “Narrative and community,” 25. I borrow the term “semiosphere” from Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, 22. 154 Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 15. 155 Ṣaḥāba is a specific prosopographical and hagiological category in Islam, designating people who lived during the time of Muhammad and accompanied him in his endeavors, albeit there are multiple definitions of this group. M. Muranyi, “Ṣaḥāba,” in EI2; Khalek, “Byzantine hagiographical topoi,” 106; idem., Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 48ff.

Sarah Savant refers to transmission as “evidence of the fostering of shared memories.”156 I agree that the preservation of certain stories in written and oral form across generations, genres, and geographical locations is only possible if there is a shared value of the stories for the transmitters, at the points of transmission. This definition, however, is too generic, since there are multiple modes and degrees of transmission. Long-lasting memories do change over time and are interpreted anew in different semiotic systems and cultural contexts. In certain instances, new interpretations of old stories erase the memory of the latter, completely recontextualizing the hero of the story. Robert Gregg’s monograph, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings, demonstrates the practice of creating and sustaining new meanings for shared symbols. 157 In the Introduction to Intercultural

Transmission in the Medieval Mediterranean Stephanie Hathaway also reminds the readers that texts that show the transmission of ideas are “mirrors of the journey of these ideas as well as tools by which these ideas are disseminated, transformed and reshaped for use in a particular community.” 158 I follow this dynamic approach to transmission and its transformative power.

Tropes, persona, and narratives are transmitted across cultural boundaries. The former, as mentioned above, is a wide-spread phenomenon. Tropes and topoi are shared by various linguistic and religious traditions in antiquity, finding uses and expressions in a

156 Sarah Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory and Conversion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4. 157 Robert Gregg, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings. Early Encounters of Jews, Christians and Muslims (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), xiii-xviii. 158 Stephanie Hathaway, “Introduction,” in Intercultural Transmission in the Medieval Mediterranean, eds. Stephanie Hathaway and David Kim (London; New York: Continuum, 2012), xvii; also see Carlos Frankel et.al. “Introduction,” in Vehicles of Transmission, Translation and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, eds. idem. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 1-22.

48 multitude of literary works. Shared tropes between texts point more to shared modes of expression than direct literary interactions. It is important to point out shared tropes in order to contextualize a text within broader semiotic systems it is nourished from. Yet, tracing them for a source analysis could be a misleading process. Transmission of narratives, at the other end of the spectrum, yields more fruitful analyses, especially if we are able to identify and compare the multiple reiterations of a narrative. Yet, it is quite rare to find a narrative being transmitted, and I will return to this issue shortly. The transmission of persona is the most common form of transmission especially between Christianity and

Islam, and it is significant to distinguish it from the other two forms.

When a hagiographical persona is transmitted from Christianity to Islam, the hero’s name, either as a transliteration or translation, is recognizable. The hero’s story, as well, is recognizable in broad strokes. The story that is narrated anew, however, has significantly different details in the Islamic context. Searching for a mediating text that bridges between the known Christian version of a saint, and the story of that saint in an Islamic text is often a fruitless effort. And it presumes that direct textual transmission of a hitherto unknown text and misattributing a new, thus “foreign”, story to the dossier of a saint are the two options that can account for the differences in details. However, the transmission of persona is a mode in between these two poles. This mode of transmission entails fictive writing of a narrative of a hero, whose previously known story is used in broad strokes for framing the new narrative. In discourses like hagiography, where it is difficult to speak about canonicity, this form of writing is a significant component contributing to the development of the saint’s broader dossier. Through such writing, Muslim authors often become

49 hagiographers of Christian saints for their Muslim audiences. The majority of examples of hagiographical transmission in the following chapters will fall under this category.

For analyzing the various semiotic trajectories of stories and narratives, I define textual transmission as a Muslim 159 author/narrator choosing to use a Christian 160 hagiographical narrative (originating in Christian literary milieu) in his writing with a particular purpose in mind pertaining to the role of that story in his composition. He might have accessed the narrative in Christian written or oral sources, or in an earlier Muslim historian’s writings. Therefore, I do not indicate that Muslim authors mentioned here de facto adapted a Christian story directly from its Christian context. Some of them did; many of them, however, only used material from their Muslim predecessors, probably not knowing the original Christian version (or other religious background) of the narrative.

Thus, determining transmission becomes a speculative task, in light of seemingly related traditions preserved in literature.

Julia Kristeva, who coined and developed the term “intertextuality” in the 1960s, defined it as an “indicator of how the text reads history and locates itself in it.” 161

Approximately a decade later Jonathan Culler published his “Presupposition and intertextuality,” in which he defined the term as “any prior source of textual authority,” and argued for explicit and implied textualities.162 Both of these frames are useful in

159 Although Muhammad was a transmitter of stories, as well as many of his Companions, I do not insinuate that Muslim identity and theological concepts were identifiably distinguished during his life time. 160 There will be a few exceptions to this, since some stories originated in pre-Christian Mediterranean. 161 Julia Kristeva, “Narration et transformation,” Semiotica 1(1969): 422-448, esp. 443; Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, 11ff. 162 Jonathan Culler, “Presupposition and intertextuality,” Modern Language Notes 91, no. 6 Comparative Literature (1976): 1380-96.

50 thinking about relationality in the transmission of saints’ stories. Every narrative demonstrates a certain knowledge of the previous narratives about that story, and thus contributes to the dossier of the saint, and situates itself within the incremental process of the formation of that dossier. From this perspective, every text that alludes to or reiterates the story of a saint has a certain level of intertextuality with other such texts that belong to the same dossier. 163 Every storytelling session is similarly conjoining the previous narrations of that story. This network is of course complicated by many sorts of alterations in the processes of telling, preservation, and re-telling of stories. So, how does one study the levels and modes of the relationality between multiple iterations of a story? What types of tools are there to narrow down sample sets and determine relatively more direct conversation between texts? For this, I return to narratology.

Narratology, particularly according to Vladimir Propp’s and Roland Barthes’ studies, assumes that a narrative has a structure consisting of functions that are found in most similar texts, and a rhetorical layer that “clothes” those functions, making every text distinct.164 For instance, “holy man/woman (the hero) defeats the spiritual enemy/opponent

(the villain)” would be a common function among many hagiographical stories in late antiquity and beyond. An author’s rhetorical and poetic choices would then clothe this function and create a story of a holy man uprooting a cultic tree or exorcising a demon from a body. This understanding of texts is helpful in analyzing intertextualities varying between two poles, namely, allusion and verbatim quotation. Similarities on the rhetorical and poetic level (not on the functional level) between two or more texts might indicate an

163 For “levels of intertextuality,” see Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, 43-48. 164 Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory, 44-47, 51-53.

51 active conversation between those texts. Persecution of believers by non-believer tyrants is a common function. Yet, persecution by throwing the believers into fire is a more specific rhetorical choice that, if shared, might indicate transmission of specific narratives between two or more texts.

Motifs, the smallest irreducible particles in a narrative, are also helpful in determining intertextuality. Static motifs are mostly descriptive parts of a narrative that are dispensable and alterable, whereas dynamic motifs are situations that are essential for the causality of events in a storyline.165 The more static motifs appear to be common between texts, the more comfortably one might assume a conversation between them. Since the names or cognomens of heroes, names of places that the events take place, descriptions of a saint’s ascetic behavior and practice, and dialogues between characters in a narrative are generally not necessary for the causality of events to unfold, I look for intertextuality when these elements appear similar between texts. By using the abovementioned narratology and intertextuality models, I determine hagiographical stories that have been transmitted into the Islamic tradition.

I analyze texts at multiple points in time: the creation of the Christian text or flourishing of the legend if available; the context of its transmission from Christianity to

Islam; and the milieu of the Muslim author/editor/collector. I do not imply, however, that any story in Islam has a single and definite Christian story as its source. I do not claim direct, linear influences and intertextualities. Many stages of transmission processes cannot be reconstructed due to the difficulty in tracing oral tradition. Moreover, sometimes multiple narratives played a role in the formation of a later narrative. Therefore, when I

165 Castle, Literary Theory, 69.

52 compare the Islamic version of a narrative to its Christian version, I do not argue that the latter is the only or a direct source for the former. In fact, here I am not engaging in a source-study. Rather, I am analyzing a tool of representation and meaning-making, namely,

Christian hagiography, in medieval Islamic literature.

Transmissions do not occur on the axis of a singular genre. A narrative that appears in a certain genre in Christian literature might be given place in a completely different genre in Islam. Therefore, it is not accurate to refer to these as mere “hagiographical” transmissions. Narratives I analyze are hagiographical in nature, but they are found in multiple different genres in Islamic literature: exegesis, local and universal history, biography, dictionary, treatise on asceticism/mysticism, to name the most prominent.

Therefore, a genre change, or lack thereof, despite being an important descriptive part of an analysis of transmission, is not always an accurate compass in determining the changing role of narratives between Christianity and Islam.

After identifying the transmission of a hagiographical story to Islamic literature, I assess how the narrative fits within the new text. I search for inner causality and sequence of various parts of the text, which brings to fore the importance of the author’s or compiler’s organization of his work. With this approach, I determine how a specific

(Christian) saint’s story fits within the overall flow of an Islamic text. If available, the

Muslim author’s prologue and his description of the work, as well as the title of the work or its chapters, could be used. Such analysis is necessary when I analyze the role of the story/narrative in later textual contexts, for it seeks answers to questions such as: In what chapter/section of the text does the author place the Christian saint’s story? What precedes and follows the narrative? Does there seem to be a reason behind the choice of this

53 sequence? With the help of narratology and new criticism, I determine the roles of the

Christian story, albeit with the acknowledgement that structuralist frameworks are often superimposed upon texts for the convenience of the historian. The actual thinking and writing processes of ancient authors significantly differed from each other and were further complicated by editorial processes and manuscript traditions. These concerns necessitate a de-emphasis on functionalist frames, and a close consideration of the individual authors in their specific social contexts.

New historicism brings the cultural-historical background of the author into the analysis of the text.166 This practice assumes, among others, that texts, as expressive acts, are “embedded in a network of material practices,” and inseparably circulate with non- literary texts that are contingent to their production, such as cultural symbols, gender norms, political networks, economics and the like. 167 This method is referred to as

“hermeneutics of culture” that is “designed to interpret the dense, web-like disposition of languages, texts, and other sign systems that determine historical identities and situations.”168 It prescribes the task of the historian as “to ‘map’ the various connections and relations between literary texts and the social and cultural contexts.”169

I will use new historicist practice in my analyses of the iteration of each story in its specific social-historical context, in order to understand what the stories of Christian saints symbolized in various Islamic literary and cultural contexts. I quote Mimi Hanaoka at length here, who describes her monograph as the following: “[T]his project pays close

166 Castle, Literary Theory, 119-125. 167 Ibidem. 168 Ibid., 121-2. 169 Ibid., 123.

54 attention to the purpose and intention behind a text’s creation and what the texts reveal about how their authors perceived themselves and the world around them. These are insights that can be gleaned, in significant part, from the themes, claims, references, and strategies evident in the texts themselves.”170 One type of these references and strategies appears to be including hagiographical representations and stories of Christian saints in

Islamic texts. Here I analyze, as much as possible, the intentions of the authors underlying this choice. While assessing strategies, I do not demean religious feelings of these authors; but my focus is on their conversations with their audience(s) through their presentations and representations of Christian saints.

I follow the school of thought that has an inclusive definition of “literature,” referring not only to belles-lettres but to a larger corpus of Christian and Islamic writings.

This is because, as Sebastian Günther emphasizes, “classical Arabic scholarship itself did not confine ‘literature’ to fictional or imaginary prose.”171 The same is observed for ancient

Christian writings, since the boundaries between fictional and non-fictional genres were often blurred. The narratives I analyze in this project are found in multiple literary genres, and I refer to all of them as Christian or Islamic literature.

A final theoretical note that I would like to dwell on here, which is very central to this project, is the definition of hagiography. The term is used to refer to writings about holy men and women, particularly their lives, miracles, and martyrdoms. Since there is not a specific genre, content, form, style, or length of writing that the term hagiography

170 Mimi Hanaoka, Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3. 171 Sebastian Günther, “Introduction,” in Ideas, Images and Methods of Portrayal: Insights into Classical Arabic Literature and Islam, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), xviii- xix; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 6.

55 denotes, it is more useful to conceptualize it as a discourse. A discourse, which, through the example of a saintly person, exhorts, admonishes, sets an example for pietistic behavior, reminds of a particular place, among others. According to this definition, many biblical stories of ancient prophets fit under the category of hagiography. Therefore, although my focus is on non-biblical characters and stories between Christianity and Islam, I often bring in examples from biblical literature, and often use the conflated term “biblical- hagiographical” to refer to stories of biblical prophets. This conflation is especially useful in the early Islamic context, where, as will be extensively shown below, stories of “biblical” prophets and saints appear together with non-biblical, “hagiographical” narratives.

4. The structure and format of the dissertation

In light of the abovementioned state of the field and theoretical conventions, I analyze the transmission of Christian hagiographical stories into Islamic contexts, and the modes of participation of Christian saints’ stories in the processes of Islamic meaning making and identity building. Chapter 1 takes up the question of transmission and demonstrates the multiple agents that played a crucial role in the circulation and dissemination of Christian hagiographical stories within the community around Muhammad during and shortly after his lifetime. I extensively discuss Muhammad as a storyteller based on a diachronic literary reading of the Qur’ān in light of speech-act and reader-response theories. I then highlight the other public preachers in the community, such as local ascetics, slaves and servants, early converts, and Muhammad’s Companions. This chapter situates the early Islamic community within the broader scriptural universe of late antiquity. It argues for the significance of the multiple modes of public speech, particularly storytelling, for the

56 transmission of Christian biblical-hagiographical stories into the community around

Muhammad in the Ḥijāz in the sixth and the seventh centuries.

In Chapter 2, focusing on one qur’ānic sūra, namely, sūrat al-kahf, I first demonstrate how Christian biblical-hagiographical stories appear in the Qur’ān. Secondly,

I analyze Muslim communities’ use of Christian biblical and hagiographical literature towards the hermeneutics of the Qur’ān. Since exegetical tradition provides the most voluminous material regarding the transmission and utilization of Christian hagiography in Islam, I allocate a chapter for the qur’ānic functions of Christian hagiography in its own.

In sūrat al-kahf there are 4 narratives, all exemplifying significant oral and literary phenomena regarding hagiographical transmission. The first one is the story of the aṣḥāb al-kahf (Companions of the Cave), an abbreviated version of the late antique story known as the Youths of Ephesus; the second is a parable of a rich man and a poor man, which appears to be a reiteration of the biblical story of the Rich Man and Lazarus; then the story of Moses and his servant; and finally the story of the Two-horned, who is generally identified as Alexander the Great in medieval and modern scholarship. There is voluminous scholarship on these passages and their representations of these well-known late antique stories. I will provide an overview of this literature, adding a number of important ancient sources to the conversation. I will then analyze the Islamic community’s memory of the recital of this qur’ānic chapter and uses of Christian hagiography for the hermeneutics of these passages.

In Chapter 3, I discuss the four functions of Christian saints’ stories in Islamic literature beyond exegesis: 1) for encomiastic purposes, as excellences of towns and regions; 2) as etiologies for Islamic practice and material culture; 3) for didactic purposes,

57 as examples of universal piety and wisdom; and 4) as members of the Muslim umma.

Different sections of a text might play different roles, which may not be parallel to the work’s overarching purpose. Therefore, while categorizing the role of a narrative within a text as exegetical, encomiastic, historical, etc., I will focus on the particular story and narrative, and not assume that this categorization applies to the overall nature of the work.

Moreover, these categories are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact, they are most of the time overlapping.172 A story of a Christian saint likely served multiple purposes in an

Islamic text. For instance, it can both comment on a qur’ānic event and the sanctity of a specific locale. Nevertheless, my categorization in this chapter elucidates the multifarious relationships between hagiographical traditions of Christianity and Islam and underlines the multiplicity in authorships and audiences (perceived or real) of texts and stories.

While Chapter 3 presents the complexities and varieties of transmission through four different examples, Chapter 4 focuses on one story. It presents the transmission of the fifth-century Syriac story of Paul and John into the Islamic tradition (renamed as Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ), and the diachronic uses and reinterpretations of this story across multiple time periods, locations, and genres within the Islamic literature. I trace the reception history of the story from the fifth until the thirteenth century, demonstrating the ways in which it was reoriented by Muslim authors towards different purposes. Such an in-depth analysis takes the discussions on transmission out of the binary models, as exchanges between two traditions at a point of contact and shows the on-going conversations after a story is transmitted to Islam.

172 Cf. the four uses of biography outlined in Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 6-9.

In Chapter 5, I discuss some significant theoretical concepts and issues in light of my analyses in the preceding chapters. The perception of ascetics, monks, and monasticism in Islam; authority and authorship, and the contexts of transmission that are highlighted in literature are among the discussions I bring up in this concluding chapter. As I summarize my examples, and contextualize my research, I argue that in Christian-Muslim relations, after a certain time, encounter and dialogue left their place to dialectic and conversation as the determinants of cultural interactions in general, and narrative transmission in particular.

This project establishes that the increasing knowledge of Christian saints in Islam became a cultural asset through which Muslim communities participated in a broader ecumenical exchange, while forming their local identities through the same medium.

One of the essential directions this project should expand into is the incorporation of Jewish midrash and broader late antique folklore into the Christian-Muslim hagiographical dialogue, which is beyond the scope of this dissertation.173 I also do not extensively engage with a number of topics and source material, incorporation of which is a must for the future of this research. Among these currently underexplored topics are

Christian and Arabic poetry (except for brief analyses of Christian hymns and homilies), and material culture, especially an in-depth analysis of pilgrimage sites and shrines as contexts of interconfessional exchanges and transmissions.

I use the Gregorian calendar for all the dates, unless cited otherwise. For transliterations of Greek, Syriac and Arabic words I follow the SBL Handbook of Style.174

173 Some of the foundational studies are: Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Regina Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem, eds., A Companion to Folklore (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2012). 174 Billie Jean Collins, project director, The SBL Handbook of Style (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014).

Aside from a small number of exceptions, I do not pluralize the foreign words in their original language. As for the original titles of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic works: If I am using an English translation, I use the English translation of the title. If I analyze the text in its original language (in addition to using an English translation), I use the original title in transliteration. In these instances, I give the English translation of the full title in the first footnote given for the text. For scriptures, I use the translations of the New Oxford

Annotated Bible,175 and the Qur’ān translated by Alan Jones, with minor modifications.176

And I follow the down style in not capitalizing the adjectival uses “biblical” and “qur’ānic.”

I have used a number of reference works, among which are the Encyclopaedia of Islam

(the second and the third editions), the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, and the Wiley

Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān.

175 Bruce Metzger and Roland Murphy, eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 176 Alan Jones, trans., The Qur’ān (Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007).

CHAPTER 1: “IN WHAT RESPECT IS MUHAMMAD A BETTER STORYTELLER THAN I?” MUHAMMAD AS A STORYTELLER

In Muhammad’s biography, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, Ibn Isḥāq (d. 768) gives the following account:

Now al-Naḍr b. al-Hārith was one of the satans of Quraysh; he used to insult the apostle [Muhammad] and show him enmity. He had been to al-Ḥīra and learnt there the tales of the kings of Persia, the tales of Rustum and Isbandiyār. When the apostle had held a meeting in which he reminded them of God and warned his people of what had happened to bygone generations as a result of God’s vengeance, al- Naḍr got up when he sat down, and said, “I can tell a better story than he, come to me.” Then he began to tell them about the kings of Persia, Rustum and Isbandiyār, and then he would say, “In what respect is Muhammad a better storyteller than I?” 177

Islamic literary tradition preserves this episode as a part of a discourse on the harassment and persecution of Muhammad in Mecca, and as an exegesis of the qur’ānic verses in which disbelievers are portrayed as referring to Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitations as “fables of those of old” (asāṭīr al-awwalīn), a term repeated nine times in the Qur’ān. 178 This anecdote, on the other hand, possibly carries a kernel of truth: that Muhammad’s qur’ānic

177 Alfred Guillaume, trans., Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allāh (Karachi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136; Arabic: al-Sīra al-nabawiyya (Cairo, 1996); Raven, “Sīra,” EI2; Jones, “Ibn Isḥāḳ,” EI2. All citations are from Guillaume’s translation; however, I have occasionally emended for clarification. Ibn Hishām (d. 833), who edited the Sīra noted for this passage: “He [al-Naḍr] it is who, according to my information, said, ‘I will send down something like what God has sent down.’” Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 718. For the story of Rustum and Isbandiyār (also known as Rustam and Isfandiyar), see Reuben Levy, trans., The Epic of the Kings. Shah-nama: The National Epic of Persia by Ferdowsi (London: Arkana, 1990), 194-218. 178 Q6:25, 8:31, 16:24, 23:83, 25:5, 27:68, 46:17, 68:15, 83:13. For the debates on the meaning of the term asāṭīr al-awwalīn, see Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 26 fn. 61; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 12-13.

61 proclamations at times sounded like storytelling to his audience, and that the material he narrated was similar or comparable to the hagiographical or epic traditions that people were familiar with in late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.

Muhammad has been described as a social reformer,179 moral reformer,180 and an eschatological prophet, 181 among others. Instead of retrospectively identifying an overarching quality that defines his career, however, it is more useful to highlight the changing perceptions of his audiences based on the multifaceted nature of his public speech.182 To this avail, I analyze Muhammad as a narrator of stories, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in the development of qur’ānic prophetology and the persona of

Muhammad in the Islamic tradition. Muhammad’s prophetic career, involving his recitation of the Qur’ān and his broader, non-qur’ānic public speech, was a historically contingent event, and understanding this event sheds invaluable light on 1) the roles of storytelling in public-prophetic speech, 2) the transmission of biblical and extra-biblical stories across communities, and 3) the role of narrating stories in meaning making and community building. My aim is to contribute to our understanding of such mechanisms in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages through the persona and career of Muhammad.

179 Crone, Meccan Trade, passim; Margoliouth, Mohammed, 1-24. Peter Brown describes him as a typical holy man in late antique society, replacing the institution of the temple, in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 103-4, 148ff. 180 Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’ān, 101-47; idem., Muhammad at Mecca, 72-85; Harris Birkeland, The Lord Guideth: Studies on Primitive Islam (Oslo: I Kommisjon hos H. Aschehoug, 1956), 5. 181 Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 1-10; Shoemaker, Death of a Prophet, 118ff;, et passim. For a useful review of the scholarship, see ibid., fn. 56. 182 Stepping out of the terminology of narratology, in this chapter, I use the verb “recite/proclaim” for Muhammad’s qur’ānic speech, and use “narrate” for his non-qur’ānic speech and storytelling. At no point do I claim Muhammad’s authorship for the Qur’ān, which, as presented in the Introduction (pp. 32ff), has been extensively debated in scholarship.

Muhammad publicly addressed the community around him for approximately twenty years.183 The Qur’ān is a record of a part of this communication.184 Muhammad, according to the Islamic tradition, transmitted and recited God’s speech in the form of a qur’ānic proclamation. In its codified form, the Qur’ān includes various genres of writing, homilies, legal rulings, prayers, and narratives, to cite a few.185 Since it is an axial text for its historical environment, 186 and most probably preserves Muhammad’s recitation accurately to an acceptable degree, 187 one can harvest important information regarding the language, content, discursive features, and stylistic forms of Muhammad’s public speech from the content of the Qur’ān. Although traditionally the qur’ānic recitation was not

Muhammad’s own speech, it was still a mode of public address at least in the memory and imagination of his followers, and Muhammad, in this particular mode of speaking, narrated numerous stories.

The qur’ānic proclamation was not the only context for Muhammad’s communication with the community around him. Islamic literature preserves other modes and forms of Muhammad’s speech, as represented in the sīra, ḥadīth, asbāb al-nuzūl, and

183 F. Buhl, et al. “Muḥammad,” in EI2; Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 104ff. The duration of his prophetic career in Mecca is debated, the number of years suggested varying between eight to fifteen. Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 57-8. 184 Tamara Sonn, “Introducing,” in WBCQ, 3-6; Angelika Neuwirth, “Structure and the emergence of community,” in WBCQ, 140-8; idem., “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 183; Nicolai Sinai, “The Qur’ān as process,” in The Qur’ān in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’ānic Milieu, eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai and Michael Marx (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), 407-39. For the concept of “open revelation,” see Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word, 19. 185 Mustansir Mir, “Language,” in WBCQ, 96; Welch, Paret, Pearson, “al-Ḳurʾān,” in EI2; also see R. Paret, “The Qur’ān – I,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. A. F. L. Beeston et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 186-227. 186 Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1, 7-8. 187 Neuwirth, “Structure,” 141.

63 other genres. 188 The difference between these modes of public speech performed by

Muhammad, namely, the qur’ānic and non-qur’ānic modes, is important. All of these literary expressions record and interpret specific experiences of Muhammad (or experiences of his community with him) through particular symbols and styles. Thus, we see a different voice, content, style, and organization in each of these literary traditions, depending on what aspect of Muhammad’s life and prophecy is represented and for which purposes.189 In addition to the different experiences these literatures represent, the generic distinctions add another layer of separation: the Qur’ān is meta-genre, whereas the sīra is a biography, and ḥadīth is anecdote. These literary genres (or lack thereof, in the case of the Qur’ān) have their own conventions. Therefore, we ought to be careful in claiming constant and clear distinctions between Muhammad’s multiple modes of speech based on the presentations in these literary contexts.

Linguistic and social analyses in fact indicate that these distinctions were not always present. The Qur’ān features complex uses of pronouns with prominent changes in grammatical person, number and tense,190 which is one of the salient outcomes of the

Qur’ān’s oral character.191 As a result of such grammatical inconsistencies, it is likely that

God as the narrator was sometimes conflated with Muhammad as the narrator from the

188 For the different images of Muhammad developed in various literary genres, see Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, passim. 189 For a very useful overview of the discursive differences between sīra, ḥadīth and tafsīr, see Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, chapters 1 and 3. 190 Watt, Bells’ Introduction to the Qur’ān, 65ff; Neal Robinson, Discovering the Qur’ān (London: SCM Press, 2003), 245ff; Thomas Hoffman, The Poetic Qur’ān: Studies in Qur’ānic Poeticity (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007); Rosalind Ward Gwynne, “Patterns of address,” in WBCQ, 73-87; Sells, “Casting,” 126. 191 Mir, “Language,” 94-96.

64 perspective of the audience.192 Moreover, there was a shift in Muhammad’s representation in the qur’ānic discourse from “a messenger from God” to “the messenger of God,” as emphasized by Khalidi,193 and this development also likely had an impact in the perception of Muhammad’s speech and its relation to God’s. Moreover, there are instances preserved in the Islamic communal memory reflecting the possible confusions about Muhammad’s and God’s speech during Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation. One of the prominent such phenomena is ḥadīth qudsī, reports in which Muhammad is quoted as saying “God said

[…],” which were not included in the Qur’ān.194 Another example is the so-called satanic verses incident, the reports that narrate Muhammad reciting from Satan, mistaking satanic inspiration with God’s revelation.195 Yet another example is that in the early Islamic era there were instances in which people debated whether the content of a preaching, delivered from a pulpit of a mosque, was in fact a verse from the Qur’ān;196 indeed even if people agreed on the content of the Qur’ān, there were numerous disagreements as to the readings in different regions, as recorded by the tenth-century historian Ibn al-Nadīm.197 In addition to the linguistic features and occasions of the on-going qur’ānic proclamation, the socio- political dynamics in the Ḥijāz also played a role in the shaping of the public perceptions

192 The audiences’ possible conflation of Muhammad’s qur’ānic versus non-qur’ānic speech (that is, God’s speech versus his own speech) is extensively discussed in Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word, passim; and Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 189-208. For language as an agent upon the audience, see Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory, 42ff. 193 Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 27. 194 J. Robson, “Ḥadīt̲h̲ Ḳudsī,” in EI2. In some reports when Muhammad gives his opinion on a matter, his audience asks him whether it is God speaking through him, or he is giving them ordinary human opinion. Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 8. 195 For an extensive analysis of these reports, see Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, passim. 196 Bayard Dodge, ed. and trans., The Fihrist of al-Nadīm. A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York; London: Columbia University Press, 1970), 1:197. 197 Ibid., 1:62-75.

65 of Muhammad. Al-Azmeh, among others, points out the ostensible conflation of God’s and

Muhammad’s authority once the latter’s power was solidified in the community.198

Despite the preservation of a memory of such confusions, and the possibility that for the community around Muhammad his qur’ānic proclamations were not always clearly distinguished from his own speech and exhortations, the Islamic tradition emphasized the distinctions between the qur’ānic revelation and other genres in which Muhammad’s speech is preserved. For example, the historical development of the ḥadīth literature is presented as a process in which the community around Muhammad and the generations immediately following it remembered the extra-qur’ānic speeches of Muhammad, and preserved them, in a gradually more distinct form and style. 199 Moreover, there are numerous reports that emphasize Muhammad’s transcendent experiences while reciting the qur’ānic verses, and the uniqueness of that recitation in comparison to the other discourses the audience was familiar with, which was not emphasized for his non-qur’ānic speech.200

Of course, such literary definitions, highly embellished with hagiographical tropes,201 cannot securely be taken as historical information for Muhammad’s public speech. Still, according to the majority of the literary tradition the qur’ānic speech was different than the speech depicted in the ḥadīth and other literary genres. I find it important to distinguish

198 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 382, 446. 199 See pp. 39-40 above. 200 Banniester, Oral-formulaic Study, 19-21; Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 115, 135-6, 175, 201 The reception history of the Bible and Christian hagiography is abundant in literary depictions in which a reciter of a proclamation, prayer or story is (or appears as) in a trance-like state. For an overview of the scholarship and prominent literary examples, see Alberto Quiroga Puertas, “Preaching and mesmerizing: The resolution of religious conflicts in late antiquity,” in Role of Bishop in Late Antiquity: Conflict and Compromise, eds. Andrew Fear, José Fernández Urbiña and Mar Marchos Sanchez (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013), cpt. 10, 150-165. The trope is seen in the earliest Christian hagiographical writing, the Life of Antony. Gregg, Life of Antony, 90 (§82).

66 between the mode of storytelling in these different contexts, not because I suggest that everybody around Muhammad clearly knew when he was reciting from God and when he was himself speaking, but because this distinction enhances our understanding of the multiple modes of storytelling in antiquity. In what follows, I will analyze the types of storytelling Muhammad performed, through both the Qur’ān and his representations in non-qur’ānic literature, in order to understand the transmission, circulation, and utilization of saints’ stories in the earliest Islamic community.

1.1. Storytelling in the Qur’ān

According to his biographical tradition, Muhammad began his qur’ānic proclamation in

Mecca upon the first revelation he received around the year 610.202 Per Theodor Nöldeke’s ordering, he preached about 90 sūras in Mecca until his hijra (emigration) in 622, and an additional 24 were revealed in Yathrib (later to be called Medina). 203 A significant component of many sūras is narrative. It is difficult to categorize qur’ānic narratives, since

202 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad,104ff. 203 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 55ff; Thomas Bauer, “The relevance of early Arabic poetry for Qur’ānic studies including observations on kull and on Q 22:27, 26:225, and 52:31,” in Qur’ān in Context, eds. Neuwirth, Siani and Marx, 699-732; Neuwirth, “Structure,” 153-4. This is not to say that he preached entire chapters as coherent units, since it is reported that he received revelation mostly as groups of verses and sometimes even letters. Moreover, some of the sūras were expanded and verses abrogated over the course of his lifetime. Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 24. There has been significant research on the order of the qur’ānic chapters since Nöldeke’s work, agreeing, revising or rejecting the chronology he proposed. For an overview of scholarship, see A. Jones, “Qur’ān – II,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. Beeston et al., 228-35; Munʿim Sirry, “The Qur’an and its polemical context: Between chronology and literary approaches,” Al-Bayān 12 (2014): 115-132. For early medieval disagreements about the sequence, number, and reading of the qur’ānic sūras, see Dodge, Fihrist, 1:49-75. Nöldeke’s work, still immensely influential, is based on a reading of the Qur’ān in light of the sīra material, and pays attention to the linguistic composition of sūras. This is the approach I adopt in this chapter. Also, the exact chronological order of the sūras is not central for the purposes of my arguments in this chapter. Therefore, I use Nöldeke’s chronology.

67 they vary immensely in terms of length, linguistic style, form, and content. A great majority of them are about biblical and extra-biblical prophets204 and saints, and the majority of scholarship on qur’ānic narratives has focused on these stories. 205 In many qur’ānic narratives the characters are anonymous, although sometimes their stories are “biblical.”

Some of the narratives, despite the distinction between their heroes, are strikingly similar to each other; in yet other cases, there are multiple different stories about the same hero. In certain qur’ānic pericopes the hero of the story is God. Depending on their content, place among other narratives, style, and occasion of recital, it is tenable to argue that recitation

204 I will sustain the separation here, but the distinction, and often the implied hierarchy, between biblical and non-biblical (Arabian, parochial) prophets is problematic. It is difficult to argue that Abraham, Moses, Noah, etc. were more “non-Arab” or biblical than, for example, Hūd, for audiences in the 7th century Arabia. For an argument towards this hierarchy, see Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 17. This distinction is also clearly seen in the chapter organization in Roberto Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’ān and Muslim Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 17-50, and in Sidney Griffith, “The ‘sunna of our messengers’: The Qur’ān’s paradigm for messengers and prophets; a reading of sūrat ash-shuʿarā’ (26),” in Qur’ānic Studies Today, eds. Neuwirth and Sells, 211, 214-5. 205 For biblical stories and characters in the Qur’ān, see Uri Rubin, “Prophets and prophethood,” in WBCQ, 234-247; Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 36-46; Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen; Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians. An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Brannon Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander? Early Islamic exegesis of Qur’ān 18:60-65,” JNES 57, no. 3 (1998): 191-215; idem., Prophets in the Quran: An Introduction to the Quran and Muslim Exegesis (London; New York: Continuum, 2002); Tottoli, Biblical Prophets; Suleiman Mourad, “Qur’ānic stories about Mary and Jesus,” 13-24; idem., “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam,” 206-216; Sidney Griffith “Christian lore and the Arabic Quran: The ‘Companions of the Cave’ in sūrat al-kahf and in Syriac Christian tradition,” in The Quran in Its Historical Context, ed. Gabriel Said Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2008), 109 – 137; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 9-11; Angelika Neuwirth, Der Koran als text Spätantike: Ein europӓischer Zugang (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2010), 613ff; idem., Scripture, 385ff ; Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the People of the Book in the Language of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 62-96; Emran Elbadawi, “The impact of Aramaic (especially Syriac) on the Qur’ān,” Religion Compass 8, no. 7 (2014): 220-228; Abboud, Mary in the Qur’an; Gregg, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings; Segovia, The Quranic Noah and the Making of the Islamic Prophet; Maurice Gloton, Jesus Son of Mary in the Qur’ān and According to the Teachings of Ibn ʿArabī, trans. Edin Lohja (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2016); Christopher Buck “Discovering,” in WBCQ, 31-32; also see the chapters in the volume Qur’ānic Studies Today, eds. Neuwirth and Sells, for Jonah, Moses, Lot’s wife and other biblical characters.

68 of qur’ānic narratives was central to Muhammad’s communication with the community around him, and it served multiple purposes in his prophetic career. Analyzing these pericopes in light of cultural theories that focus on practice and performance,206 together with other literature in which Muhammad is portrayed as narrating stories, one can harvest important information about the practice of storytelling in antiquity, as demonstrated for late antique Christianity in the introduction.

Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation included storytelling from its earliest phase.207

The brief narrative of Moses and Pharaoh in sūrat al-nāziʿāt, ostensibly the 31st sūra in the order of revelation according to Nöldeke, is the first proper storytelling session in the

Qur’ān:

Have you heard the story of Moses, when his Lord called to him in the holy valley, Ṭuwā, “Go to Pharaoh. He has been insolent. Say, ‘Have you [any wish] to purify yourself, and that I should guide you to your Lord and you fear him?’ He showed him the great sign, but he denied [the truth] and acted rebelliously; then he turned away in haste, and mustered and proclaimed, saying, “I am your lord, the most high.” So, God seized him as exemplary punishment for the next world and for this. In this there is indeed a warning for those who fear. (Q79:15-26)

206 As mentioned in the Introduction, theories of storytelling have been applied to the Bible for which there is voluminous scholarship. For example, Jacob Licht, Storytelling in the Bible (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1978); Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel; Ong, “Text as interpretation,” 7-26; Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Labahn and Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte, eds., Wonders Never Cease: The Purpose of Narrating Miracle Stories in the New Testament and Its Religious Environment (London; New York: T&T Clark, 2006); Upton, Hearing Mark’s Endings; Ruard Ganzevoort, Maaike de Haardt, and Michael Scherer-Rath, eds., Religious Stories We Live By: Narratives Approaches in Theology and Religious Studies (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014); Douglas Estes and Ruth Sheridan, eds., How John Works: Storytelling in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016). 207 Appendix: “Narrativescape of the Qur’ān” presents the narrative content and other relevant information in the sūras of the Qur’ān, in the chronological sequence of revelation suggested by Nöldeke.

Another brief narrative is in sūrat al-dhāriyāt, of Abraham and his divine guests:

Have you heard of the honored guests of Abraham? When they came to see him and said, “Peace.” He said, “Peace, people unknown.” Then he went aside to his household and brought a fat calf. And he offered it to them, saying, “Will you not eat?” Then he conceived a fear of them. They said, “Do not be afraid,” and they gave him the good news of [the birth of] a wise son. His wife came forward to him, clamoring, and she smote her face and said, “O messengers, what is your business?” They said, “We are sent to a sinful people, to let loose on them stones of clay, marked for the prodigal in the presence of your Lord. (Q51:24-34) 208

The above pericopes are the longest stories in the early Meccan sūras (the first five years of Muhammad’s prophetic career). Nevertheless, parables appear to have already been an important part of Muhammad’s speech, since there are many allusions of events and persons, and the accusations that the stories he told were “fables of those of old” appear twice in these early sūras.209 Among the stories of which he reminded his audience are the

Companion of the Fish (dhū al-nūn, Jonah),210 the destruction of the peoples of ʿĀd and

Thamūd (to which the Arabian prophets Hūd and Ṣāliḥ were sent, respectively),211 and the

People of the Trench (arguably the Martyrs of Najrān – a Christian community that was persecuted under Jewish kings of Yemen in the early sixth century).212 Thus, Muhammad, from the beginning of his qur’ānic preaching, narrated or alluded to numerous stories.

208 Cf. Gen. 18. 209 Q68:15, 83:13. 210 Q68:48. 211 Q51:41-45, 53:50-52, 69:4-10, 85:17-18, 89:6-13, 91:11-15. 212 Q85:4-10.

More lengthy stories, on the other hand, start appearing in the middle Meccan period, as noted by Nöldeke.213 Noah’s story in sūrat nūḥ appears to be the first full narrative that Muhammad recited.214 In this story, God orders Noah to warn his people.

Noah’s warning is presented in the form of direct speech, after which he turns to God, and relates to Him what happened between him and his people. In verses 24-25, the direct speech ends, and we hear Muhammad the reciter: “Many indeed have they [disbelievers] led astray; and it increases the wrongdoers in naught but error. Because of their iniquities they were drowned, then made to enter a fire. And then they found no helpers for themselves apart from God.” After this, Noah’s prayer to God is given at the end of the sūra, again in direct speech.215

As Neuwirth points out, Noah, as well as other prominent prophets such as Moses and Abraham, are frequently narrated in the sūras of the second and third Meccan periods

(ca. 615 to 622). 216 In fact, Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation greatly consisted of storytelling, since out of the 42 sūras he recited in this period, 29 of them have either allusions to prophetic stories, or narratives of varying lengths and style. The narratives in these sūras generally appear in groups. In sūrat yūnus, for instance, stories of Noah and

Moses are narrated;217 in sūrat al-shuʿarā’, of Moses, Abraham and other prophets;218 in

213 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 98. This is also immediately seen in the table provided in the Appendix. 214 Q71:1-78; Neuwirth, Scripture, 396-8. 215 Q71:26-28. 216 Neuwirth, Scripture, 396-8. 217 Q10. 218 Q26.

71 sūrat al-ṣāffāt, of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Aaron;219 in sūrat maryam, one of the multiple qur’ānic representations of Mary, as well as those of Abraham, Moses, Ishmael, and Idrīs.220

Most of these narratives are formulaic, repeating similar themes, literary structures, and refrains. 221 Like many similar qur’ānic sūras, especially the Meccan ones, these chapters are rhetorically dramatic, with vivid descriptions of the endeavors of the prophets, blessings for the pious, and torments for the deniers.222 Despite the formulaic nature, however, the contents of these qur’ānic pericopes render such proclamations storytelling, with their vivid description of the characters, unfolding of events correlated to each other in a chronological frame, and dialogues between the various characters, all of which are features helping the audience visualize a story.223

In sūrat al-aʿrāf, for instance, Muhammad first narrates Adam’s Fall. Then, the audience hears about Noah, Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, Lot, Shuʿayb and Moses’s stories. The first one among these, of Noah, is narrated in the following way:

In the past we sent Noah to his people. He said, “O my people, serve God. You have no God other than Him. I fear for you the torment of a mighty day.” The notables of his people said, “We see you in manifest error.” He said, “O my people, there is no error in me; I am a messenger from the Lord of all beings. I convey to you the messages of my Lord and give you good advice; and from God I

219 Q37. 220 Q19. 221 Crone and Cook refer to them as “simple and evasive,” and argue that this made the qur’ānic message attractive. Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 17; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 9; cf. al- Azmeh’s definition of the qur’ānic narrative of Joseph as “artfully carfted in terms of sub-plots, psychological ambivalence, a transition from warning to brooding, in an almost novelistic spirit.” al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 495. 222 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 59; Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 91; Welch, “Formulaic features,” 77. 223 Cf. the storytelling aspects in literature discussed in the Introduction, pp.1-33.

know what you do not know. Do you wonder that a reminder from your Lord has come to you through a man from among you, that he may warn you and that you may protect yourselves and that you may be given mercy?” But they considered that he was not telling the truth; so, we saved him and those with him in the ship, and we drowned those who denied our signs. They were a blind people. (Q7:59-64)

The narratives in sūrat al-aʿrāf, which Bell identifies as the stories of punishment

(what according to some scholars the qur’ānic term al-mathānī refers to), vary in detail, but mostly consist of dialogues between a prophet and the people he is sent to, ending in the destruction of the people upon their denial of the prophetic message.224 After the story of Adam, the qur’ānic voice exhorts the audience on the recently-recited story, “O Children of Adam! Let not Satan tempt you, as he caused your parents to go forth from the garden,”225 and connects this to the forthcoming stories of the prophets with, “O Children of Adam! Should there come unto you messengers from among yourselves, recounting my signs unto you, then whoever is reverent and makes amends, no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve.”226 Before the stories of the messengers, a lengthy, dramatic dialogue between the dwellers of heaven and those of hell takes place, as a prolepsis to the post- apocalyptic time, leading the audience to a visualization of what happens to deniers of the

224 For stories of punishment, see A.T. Welch, R. Paret, and J.D. Pearson, “al-Ḳurʾān,” in EI2; Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’ān, 127-35; Welch, “Formulaic features of the punishment stories,” 77-116; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 4-13. In sūrat al-anbiyā (Q21) as well as in some other sūras, lists of prophets are given, but no particular narratives are attributed to them, except for brief mentions. See ibid., 99ff. For al-mathānī, also see Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 93- 94. 225 Q7:27. 226 Q7:35. In the later Meccan sūras, Nöldeke notes, the qur’ānic diction often includes the address “O, you people” (yā ayyuha al-nās), which underlines the prosaic character of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation betook, as opposed to the poetic. Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 117.

73 divine message. Following this dialogue, the audience hears the stories of the prophets

Noah, Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, Lot, and Shuʿayb.

Another example of storytelling where the story is suspended for a commentary is seen in sūrat al-ʿankabūt. During the recitation of the story of Abraham warning his people against idolatry, a prominent shift in time occurs, from ancient to contemporary, which marks a commentary upon the story:

And Abraham, when he said to his people, “Serve God and fear Him. That is better for you, if you did but know. You serve only idols, to the exclusion of God, and you create a lie. Those whom you serve to the exclusion of God have no sustenance for you. So, seek provision with God and serve Him and be grateful to Him. To Him you will be returned. But if you deny the truth, communities have denied before you. It is only for the messengers to convey the message clearly.” [commentary on the story begins] Have they not seen how God originates creation and then brings it back again? That is easy for God. Say, “Journey in the land and see how He originated creation. Then God will cause the later growth to grow. God has power over everything. He punishes those whom he wishes, and He has mercy on those whom He wishes. To him you will be returned. You cannot frustrate [Him] on earth or in heaven; nor have you any protector or helper apart from Him.” Those who disbelieve in God’s signs and in the meeting with Him, those have despaired of my mercy; those will have a painful torment. [the story resumes] The only answer of his folk was to say, “Kill him or burn him.” Then God delivered him from the fire. [another commentary begins] In that there are signs for people who believe. [the story resumes] He said, “You have chosen idols to the exclusion of God only because of the affection between you in the life of this world. Then on the Day of Resurrection you will deny one another and curse one another. Your abode will be the fire, and you will have no helpers. And Lot believed him, and said, “I am going to migrate to my Lord. He is the Mighty and the Wise.” And we gave him Isaac and Jacob and placed prophecy and the scripture among his progeny. We gave him his reward in this world, and he will be among the righteous in the world to come. (Q29:16-27)

Muhammad did not only recite prophets’ and saints’ stories, for the Islamic character of Satan (Iblīs) also began to develop in this period.227 Iblīs first briefly appears in sūrat ṭāhā, as the one who did not prostrate before Adam, and the one who deceives him and his companion in heaven.228 In sūrat al-ḥijr, which Muhammad recited around the same time, a more developed narrative is found, in the form of a dialogue between God and Iblīs:

We have created man from clay, from a moulded mud; we created the jinn before from the fire of the scorching wind. [note the change of the narrator] And when your Lord said to the angels, “I am creating man from clay, from a moulded mud; so, when I have formed him and breathed into him some of my spirit, fall down in prostration to him.” All the angels prostrated themselves, all except Iblīs. He refused to be amongst those who prostrated themselves. He said, “O Iblīs, why is it that you are not amongst those who prostrate themselves?” He said, “I am not one to prostrate myself to a mortal whom you have created from clay, from a moulded mud.” He said, “Leave it. You are accursed. The curse will be upon you till the Day of Judgement.” He said, “My Lord, because you have led me astray, I shall make things seem beautiful for them in the land and I shall lead them astray, all [of them] except for your devoted servants amongst them.” He said, “This is a straight path for me. You have no authority over my servants, except those errant ones who follow you.” Jahannam is the place promised for them all. (Q15:26-43)

Muhammad recited about Iblīs in three more sūras in Mecca, each of which contributes to the development of Iblīs’ character and his attributes. 229 Iblīs’ defense against people’s accusations in sūrat ibrāhīm is among the latest additions to his qur’ānic representation:

227 Neuwirth, Scripture, 401-3; Whitney Bodman, The Poetics of Iblis: Narrative Theology in the Qur’an (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, 2011); Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 1-18. 228 Q20:115-123. 229 Q7:10-27; 14:21-22, 17:61-65, 38:71-85.

They will all go forth to their Lord; and the weak will say to those who were haughty, “We were your followers. Can you avail us in any way against the punishment of God?” They will reply, “Had God guided us, we would have guided you. It is all one for us whether we are fretful, or we endure patiently. We have no place of refuge.” And Satan will say, when the matter is decided, “God has made you a true promise; but I promised you and then I failed you. I had no authority over you, except that I called you and you answered me. So do not blame me but blame yourselves. I cannot come to your aid, nor you to mine. I did not believe in that with which you associated me before. The wrong-doers will have a painful punishment.” (Q14:21-22)

As the qur’ānic extracts cited heretofore demonstrate, the content of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation rendered many such sessions storytelling. In addition to content and form, certain linguistic features of these textual units also might have contributed to their reception as storytelling by his audiences. The earliest term that refers to a narrative/story in the Qur’ān is ḥadīth.230 In fact, both of the earliest brief narratives in the early Meccan sūras, of Moses and Abraham as quoted above, are referred to as ḥadīth. The performative verb qaṣṣa begins to be used in the middle and late Meccan periods in which the majority of narrative-intense sūras were revealed. 231 In sūrat al-aʿrāf, after the stories of five prophets, Muhammad recites, “these are the towns whose stories we have recounted unto you” (naquṣṣu ʿalayka), after which follows a story of Moses.232 Later, the qur’ānic voice commands Muhammad to “narrate the stories” (f’aqṣuṣ al-qaṣaṣ), using the same verb that

230 Q12:111, 18:6, 23:44, 34:19, 51:24, 79:15, 88:1; for the use of this term in the Qur’ān, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 17-18; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 11-13. For ḥadīth as narration/tale, see Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2: 17-19. 231 Stefan Leder, “Conventions of fictional narration in learned literature,” in Story-telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature, ed. Leder, 39. The root is used in 12 sūras: Q3:62, 4:164, 6:57, 6:130, 7:7, 7:35, 7:101, 7:176, 11:100, 11:120, 12:3, 12:5, 12:111, 16:118, 18:13, 20:99, 27:76, 28:25, 40:78. For this word against asāṭīr, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 8-9. 232 Q7:101.

76 defines Muhammad’s performance.233 In sūrat al-kahf, again the audience is addressed with “we recount their story in truth” (naḥnu naquṣṣu ʿalayka naba’ahum bil-ḥaqq), after which the narrative of the of Companions of the Cave follows.234 Similarly, and perhaps most prominently, at the beginning of sūrat yūsuf, Muhammad recites, “we recount unto you the most beautiful of stories” (naquṣṣu ʿalayka aḥsan al-qaṣaṣ).235 The rest of the sūra is a complete narrative about the life and exploits of the prophet Joseph, rich in dialogue and imagery.236

Another such verb that demarcates the act of narrating a story is talā, “to recite.”237

Sūrat al-qaṣaṣ begins with “we shall relate [natlū] to you some of the story of Moses and

Pharaoh in truth, for a people who believe.”238 In the rest of the sūra, there are two stories about Moses. First, Moses’ growing up at the house of the Pharaoh, his marriage, and the episode of the Burning Bush are narrated.239 In the initial verses, the narrator is in the first- person plural pronoun. However, in verse 16 it switches, and the narrator voice speaks about God, “So He forgave him. He is the Forgiving, the Merciful.” God as the speaker does not resume until verse 40. This change in the pronouns, as mentioned earlier, is a prominent oral residue in the Qur’ān, and shows how the conflation of God and

233 Q7:176. 234 Q18:13. 235 Q12:3. 236 Some scholars date the first three verses of this sūra to the Medinan period, but, as Nöldeke notes, this is not tenable. Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 124; Johns, “The quranic presentation of the Joseph story,” 43. For a similar use of qaṣṣa, see Q4:164 “And messengers whom we have told you about before, and messengers whom we have not told you about; and God spoke to Moses directly.” Note the change in the narrator’s voice. 237 Q3:58, 5:27, 10:71, 13:30; 26:69, 28:3. 238 Q28:3. 239 Q28:3-44.

Muhammad as narrators was highly likely in these occasions of recitation and listening.

After this storytelling session there are about 30 verses in which disbelievers are described; then, the story of Moses resumes. Qārūn, from among the people of Moses who rejected

God as the provider of his treasures, and was severely punished for his corruption, is narrated.240

The verb talā denotes storytelling also in sūrat yūnus, sūrat al-shuʿarā’, and sūrat

āl ʿimrān.241 In the first two, the qur’ānic voice commands, “recite [wa-atlu] to them the story of Noah/Abraham,” after which a dialogue between the prophet and his people take place. In sūrat āl ʿimrān the story of Mary’s and Jesus’ birth, and the punishment of those who disbelieve his message are narrated.242 The story is framed with, “this we recite

[natlūhu] to you of the signs.”243 The two verbs, qaṣṣa and talā, appear to have been used interchangeably. Despite the variation in terminology, the reception of Muhammad as a storyteller pertained as a result of the content of these pericopes, which read as lively, complete narratives.

The majority of these sūras in which Muhammad recited stories were revealed in the middle and late Meccan periods. Some of them, however, were revealed and recited in

Medina, 244 which demonstrates that storytelling continued to be an integral part of

Muhammad’s prophetic career later in his life. In fact, in addition to the stories of Mary and Jesus in sūrat āl ʿimrān, in Medina he appears to have narrated the story of Adam, as

240 Q28:76-82. 241 Q10:71, 26:69, 3:58, respectively. 242 Q3:33-57. 243 Q3:58. 244 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 154-7.

78 seen in sūrat al-baqara.245 After Adam, he reminds the audience of the story of Moses through brief allusions to the generic outlines of Exodus 3-40, such as the parting of the

Red Sea, manna and quail, the event of the golden calf, revelation of the tablets, together with lengthy dialogues between Moses and his people.246 Multiple motifs from the biblical story of Moses are repeated in other Medinan sūras. The motif of forty years of wandering in the desert,247 for example, is briefly narrated in sūrat al-mā’ida, and drowning of the people of Pharaoh in sūrat al-anfāl.248 Muhammad narrated and reinterpreted the story of

Moses, in its biblical contours, over the course of multiple sessions of recitation.

Neuwirth attributes these fragments of the story appearing in different sūras to the developmental process of the Qur’ān as an ongoing communication between Muhammad and his audience.249 Every reiteration of a story was a historically contingent event, serving a different purpose, within the overall flow of Muhammad’s public speech. Yet, some of these cases point to the continuous process of storytelling, sometimes composed of multiple sessions. Neuwirth notes that the exclusion of the Israelites, “an essential part of the Moses paradigm,” from the Moses story in sūrat al-qaṣaṣ is striking.250 These omissions are not problematic, however, if we do not take every storytelling instance as an isolated event.

Likewise, we see different versions of the story of Noah, Mary, Abraham, God and Iblīs’

245 Q2:29-40. 246 For an overview of the qur’ānic passages that mention or narrate stories of Moses, see Neuwirth, Scripture, 277-305; Wheeler, Moses in the Qur’an, passim. 247 Deut. 2. 248 Q5:20-27, 8:54. 249 Neuwirth, Scripture, 277ff. 250 Ibid., 298-9; Q28.

79 dialogue in a number of sūras, with varying details. This points to an open format of storytelling that is worth further elaboration.

Let us illustrate the practice of open storytelling with an example. In sūrat maryam

Muhammad narrates a dramatic dialogue between Abraham and his disbelieving father:

Mention Abraham in the scripture. He was a true friend of God, a prophet, when he said to his father, “O my father, why do you worship something that cannot see nor hear nor be of avail to you in anything? O my father, some knowledge has come to me that has not come to you. Follow me and I shall guide you along a level path. O my father, do not serve Satan. Satan is a rebel against the Merciful. O my father, I fear that some punishment from the Merciful will touch you, and that you will become an ally of Satan.” He said, “O Abraham, are you turning away from my gods? If you do not desist, I shall surely stone you. Leave me for a while.” He said, “Peace be on you. I shall ask my Lord to forgive you. He has always shown kindness to me. I shall withdraw from you and from what you call on to the exclusion of God. I shall pray to my Lord. Perhaps I shall not be unfortunate in my prayer.” When he withdrew from them and from that which they were worshipping to the exclusion of God, we gave him Isaac and Jacob, and each we made a prophet. (Q19:41-49)

In sūrat ibrāhīm, also a Meccan sūra and possibly later than maryam, Muhammad recites

Abraham’s prayer to God to the audience, who by now knows his father’s disbelief:

And when Abraham said, “My Lord, make this territory safe and turn me and my sons away from worshipping idols. My Lord they have led many of the people astray; but those who follow me belong to me; and those who oppose me – you are forgiving and merciful. Our Lord, I have made some of my seed dwell in a valley where there is no sown land close to your Holy House, our Lord, that they may perform prayer. Cause [the] hearts of some of the people to incline to them and give them sustenance of fruits so that they may be thankful. Our Lord, you know what we conceal and what we proclaim. Nothing on earth or in heaves is hidden from God. Praise belongs to God, who has given to me, in my old age, Ishmael and Isaac. My Lord is the hearer of prayer. My Lord, make me and some of my seed perform prayer, and our Lord, receive my prayer. Our Lord, forgive me and my parents and the believers on the day when the reckoning comes to pass.” (Q14:35-41)

In another Meccan sūra, al-anʿām, we see the name of Abraham’s disbelieving father, Azar, and this time Muhammad recites a more detailed dialogue between him and

Abraham.251 According to the themes highlighted in the rest of the sūra, Muhammad appears to have recited Abraham’s example of praying for his father for exhorting the audience on the topic of seeking forgiveness for idolaters: “Abraham’s seeking of forgiveness for his father was only because of a promise he had made to him – and

Abraham was kind-hearted and prudent.” 252 Similarly, in another Medinan sūra, al- mumtaḥana, Muhammad recited the qur’ānic passages on Abraham’s father while addressing the audience on family relations, and asking for forgiveness of family members.253 The example of the qur’ānic representations of Abraham’s relationship with his father demonstrates the nature of open storytelling, by which a story is completed through multiple narrative sessions. As Muhammad addressed and interacted with different communities, the qur’ānic recitation adapted to the various occasions of preaching, narratives were reiterated, new details and emplotments of stories were revealed.

The open format is also observed on a smaller scale, when a story is narrated in one session but with various intrusions. According to some reports, Muhammad’s Companions in Medina asked him to narrate something, “if only you had given qaṣaṣ to us” (law qaṣaṣta

ʿalayna), and Muhammad recited the abovementioned sūrat al-raḥmān. 254 In the sūra the

251 Q6:74-83. 252 Q9:114. 253 Q60:4-5. 254 Al-Bukhārī, al-Tārīkh al-kabīr, ed. Hāshim al-Nadwī (Beirut, 1986), 6:374; Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 12:150.

81 word qaṣaṣ itself is not used, and as Armstrong extensively demonstrates, the verb qaṣṣa could be used for storytelling, exhortation, admonition, among others.255 Nevertheless, the content of this sūra renders it storytelling, since it creates a rich narrative depicting a vivid image of God’s creation, his teaching the humankind, the Day of Judgement, and the heaven and hell, as well as the future life of believers and disbelievers in them. 31 out of the 78 verses in this sūra repeat the formulaic question, “so which of your Lord’s boons do you two deny?”256 If one is to remove the refrain, which is an oratorical tool that adds to the dramatic, performative character of the sūra, the rest of the verses build an incremental narrative:

The Merciful has taught the Recitation, created man, taught him exposition. The sun and moon are in a reckoning. The stars and the trees bow down. He has raised up the Heaven, and He has set the balance, that you may not transgress in the balance. Perform weighing with justice and do not skimp in the balance. He has put down the earth for all the creatures; in it there are fruit and palm- trees bearing blossoms, husked grain and fragrant herbs. He created man from clay like potter’s clay, and He created the jinn from smokeless fire. Lord of the two easts and two wests. He has released the two seas [that] meet together, between them a barrier which they do not transgress. From which come pearls and coral. To Him belong the [ships] that run, raised up in the sea like way-marks. Everyone on it perishes, but the face of your Lord, which is full of glory and honor, endures. Those in the heavens and on earth ask Him [for favors]; every day He is engaged in some labor. (Q55:1-29, without the refrain)257

At the beginning of the sūra the hero of the narrative is God, and the audience is given a vivid description of his creation. In the rest of the sūra, the audience is led to

255 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 14-74. 256 The same question, phrased in the same way, is asked in Q53:55. 257 For other examples of qur’ānic refrain, see Q54 and Q77.

82 imagining believers in heaven, and disbelievers in hell, again through detailed depictions.

The refrain, repeated after almost every verse after its first recital in verse 13, certainly elevates the dramatic, poetic and performative nature of the sūra. Moreover, as Neuwirth emphasizes, these refrains create a rhythmical structure and rhymed composition that render these sūras liturgical and psalmodic.258 Neuwirth argues elsewhere that parable

(mathal) was a homiletic tool that the Qur’ān utilized,259 to which, according to this argument, sūrat al-raḥmān is an example. Reading linguistic features as aspects of the

Qur’ān’s ostensibly overarching liturgical character, however, diminishes the multifaceted nature of Muhammad’s public speech. Some of the features that scholars identify as liturgical, such as rhyming verses, refrains, and metric composition, might in fact have been products of the redaction process.260 Moreover, refrains and repeated phrases are known to have been included in storytelling sessions in antiquity. 261 Therefore, it is important to approach the storytelling of the Qur’ān in its own right, and not only as an auxiliary feature to its liturgical character.

Despite the continuous interference of the refrain in the above sūra, it does not diminish the incrementality of the narrative; the audience completes the narrative journey from the creation, to the Day of Judgement, and through heaven and hell. This is also a feature of the open mode of storytelling, in which a narrative is elongated with refrains or

258 Neuwirth, Scripture, 40; idem., Studien, 209-10. Liturgical character of the Qur’ān is also argued for in Reynolds, Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext, 245-53. 259 Neuwirth, Koran, 498-509. Also see, idem., “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 184ff. 260 For the arguments against the overarching liturgical character of the Qur’ān, see Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 441-4; Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 31. 261 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 29-30.

83 other oratorical tools like poetry or prayers.262 Extending the story of Moses, Noah and their characters across multiple recitation sessions, as demonstrated above, is another manifestation of the open storytelling, in a larger scale. The fact that the Qur’ān as a communication process builds upon itself, emphasized by Neuwirth and others,263 signifies that stories in this communication were also gradually developed, and thus should not be analyzed in isolation, neither with the final forms they appear in the qur’ānic codex. It is more helpful to conceptualize the Qur’ān’s narrativescape consisting of constellations of interrelated narratives.

Stetkevych states: “Rarely do we sense in the Qur’ān a self-sufficient and self- justifying joy of storytelling, indeed, rarely, if at all, does the Qur’ān allow for the formation of ‘themes’ in the literary terminological understanding, that is, of descriptive units that possess their own formal and thematic circumscription and ‘sufficiency’ and are not intruded upon by a stylistically disruptive rhetoric.”264 This is a somewhat restrictive understanding of ancient storytelling, and one should be reminded of the practice’s manifestations in poetic and liturgical contexts.265 The examples affirm that storytelling sessions were not composed of rigid narratives. They were punctuated by poetry,

262 Bannister refers to this feature of qur’ānic narratives as “fluidity.” Oral-formulaic Study, 12. 263 Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 183. 264 Jaroslav Stetkevych, Muḥammad and the Golden Bough: Reconstructing Arabian Myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 10. 265 For narration and anamnesis of the salvation history as Christian liturgy’s frame; Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 88; Robert Taft, “The liturgy of the Great Church: An initial synthesis of structure and interpretation on the eve of Iconoclasm, DOP 34/35 (1980/81): 45-75; idem., Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond (Aldershot; Brookfield: Variorum, 1995); Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “The stylite’s liturgy: Ritual and religious identity in late antiquity,” JECS 6, no. 3 (1998): 523-539; Steven Hawkes-Teeples, Bert Groen and Stefanos Alexopoulos, eds., Studies on the Liturgies of the Christian East: Selected Papers of the Third International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, Volos, May 26-30, 2010 (Leuven; Paris; Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013).

84 performative and prosodic elements, hermeneutical tools, conversations with the audience, and they sometimes continued over multiple sessions. These features were not “intrusions” upon storytelling but were organic parts of it.

Were there any lexical or rhetorical differences in narratives when Muhammad recited a verse/sūra in a different occasion? Additions to or abrogations of qur’ānic verses is well known in the Islamic tradition and scholarship.266 The ḥadīth literature includes reports in which we see Meccan sūras recited in Medina. For example, sūrat al-najm

(Meccan, Q103) was recited by Muhammad’s companion Zayd b. Thābit in Medina.267

Yet, I am not aware of any reports in which Muhammad himself is described as re-reciting previously proclaimed verses. It is difficult to imagine, however, that he recited qur’ānic verses only once. Therefore, it remains an interesting question whether a narrative in any sūra was not only expanded, but also revised in multiple recitations, which would be an important aspect of open storytelling.268

1.2. Broader literary contexts of qur’ānic storytelling

Qur’ānic narratives and depictions of events and persons are mostly generic and formulaic.

Some, however, show significant similarities with other hagiographical traditions of late antiquity, indicating that Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation often resonated with the oral biblical-hagiographical milieu of the late antique eastern Mediterranean. Many narratives

266 Burton, J., “Nask̲ h̲ ,” in EI2. 267 Muhammad Muhsin Khan, trans., The Translation of the Meanings of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1984), vol. 2, book 19, §178-179. For Zayd, see M. Lecker, “Zayd b. T̲ h̲ ābit,” in EI2; idem., “Zayd B. Thābit, ‘A Jew with two sidelocks’: Judaism and literacy in pre- Islamic Medina (Yathrib),” JNES 56, no. 4 (1997): 259-73 268 I am immensely thankful to Suleiman Mourad for bringing this possibility to my attention during our personal conversation on August 6, 2018.

85 were reiterations or reinterpretations of biblical-hagiographical tales familiar to the communities around Muhammad in both Mecca and Medina.269 For example, the earlier verses in the narrative in sūrat āl ʿimrān, about Mary’s childhood at the temple, and the nativity, which I will fully quote here, closely parallel the narrative in the Protoevangelium of James (1-9):270

God chose Adam and Noah and the family of Abraham and the family of ʿImrān above all created beings, the seed of one another. God is the Hearer and the Knower. When the wife of ʿImrān said, “My Lord, I have vowed to you what is in my belly as a dedicated [offering]. Accept it from me. You are the Hearer and the Knower.” When she gave birth to her, she said, “My Lord, I have given birth to her, a female.” And God was well aware of what she had given birth to. The male is not like the female. “I have called her Mary. I seek protection with you for her and for her offspring from the accursed Satan.” Her Lord received [the child] graciously and caused her to grow with fair growth; and Zachariah took charge of her. Whenever Zachariah went into the sanctuary to see her, he found that she had provisions. He said, “O Mary, where does this come from for you?” She said, “From God. God gives provision without reckoning to those whom He wishes.” Zachariah called to his Lord there, saying, “My Lord, give me a good offspring from Yourself. You are the Hearer of supplications.” And the angels called out to him whilst he was standing praying in the sanctuary, “God give you the good news of John, confirming a word from God: A chief and a chaste man and a prophet from among the righteous.” He said, “How can I have a son, when old age has come upon me

269 For the knowledge of Judaism and Christianity in Arabia, see Montgomery Watt, Muḥammad’s Mecca (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 44-46; Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 87. For the knowledge of specifically biblical stories, see Sidney Griffth, “Script, text, and the Bible in Arabic: The evidence of the Qur’ān,” (forthcoming); idem., “Sunna of our messengers,” 221-2; Sells, “Casting,” 129; Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 267. Al-Azmeh emphasizes the possibility of some itinerant people with connections to Syria having a relatively better knowledge. 270 For a comprehensive discussion of biblical stories about Mary and Jesus and their relation to certain qur’ānic passages, see Mourad, “Qur’ānic stories about Mary and Jesus,” 13-24; idem., “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam,” 206-216. For a reception history of the Protevangelium of James, see Cornelia Horn, “Tracing the reception of the Protevangelium of James in late antique Arabia: The case of the poetry of Umayya ibn Abī aṣ-Ṣalt and its intersection with the Quran,” in Religious Culture in Late Antique Arabia: Selected Studies on the Late Antique Religious Mind, eds., Kirill Dmitriev and Isabel Toral-Niehoff (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017), 123-46.

and my wife is barren?” He said, “[It will be] so. God does what He wishes.” He said, “My Lord, make a sign for me.” He said, “Your sign will be that you will not be able to speak to your people for three days except by gesture. Remember your Lord often and glorify [Him] in the evening and in the morning.” [a brief commentary on the narrative] And when the angels said, “O Mary, God has chosen you and purified you and chosen you above the [other] women [among] created beings. O Mary, be obedient to your Lord and prostrate yourself and bow with those who bow.” (Q3:33-43)

In the same sūra, the verses in which Jesus says to the Israelites that he will make a bird out of clay are reminiscent of a story in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (2.3).271

Another example of the Qur’ān echoing Christian traditions is sūrat al-kahf, which includes four distinct stories, namely, the story of the Companions of the Cave, the rich man and the poor man, Moses and his servant, and of the Two-horned.272 These brief stories have close parallels in Christian homiletic and hagiographical tradition, namely, the

Youths/Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Rich Man and Lazarus, the Angel and the Hermit, and the Alexander Legend, respectively. 273 The apocryphal gospels 274 and hagiographical stories like those of Alexander and the Youths of Ephesus, were immensely popular in the eastern Mediterranean, and I will return to such texts’ role in the formation and hermeneutics of this qur’ānic sūra in the next chapter. For the current discussion, suffice it to say that these and similar stories were likely known, if in generic outlines,275 to the

271 Q3:49; Gregg, Shared Stories, 554-57. 272 Q18. 273 There is voluminous scholarship on these passages and their comparison with and possible relations to late antique hagiographical traditions, which I will analyze in Chapter 2. 274 Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that did not Make it into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63. I use the term “apocryphal” for convenience here. For the usefulness and restrictions of the term, see ibid., 4. 275 Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’ān, 133; Neuwirth, Scripture, 391; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 270.

87 audiences around Muhammad, and thus qur’ānic recitation of stories reminiscent of or alluding to such stories was most possibly contextualized by his audience within these broader literatures and oratures in late antiquity.

As Arthur Jeffery states, the qur’ānic passages that speak about the learned among the children of Israel recognizing Muhammad’s message “may mean no more than that they recognize the stories about various biblical characters which he told in his preaching.”276 Aziz al-Azmeh argues that these “[b]iblicisms, and they are many, need to be seen in terms of compositional, situational and communicative purposes and procedures of redaction, rather than being constitutive of the Qur’ān’s textual architectonic.”277 Al-

Azmeh states this to support his argument for not seeing the Qur’ān as a mosaic of biblical textual quotations, and that it is in fact misguiding and not useful to seek direct intertextualities, literary relations and dependence between the biblical literature and the

Qur’ān.278 Approaching these biblicisms as completely new products of the early Islamic milieu, without any traceable connection to the biblical milieu, however, neglects the historical contingency of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation, a significant content of which was biblical and other prophetic and hagiographical narratives, and his relying on the audiences’ knowledge of these stories.

276 Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 84; such as Q6:114, 13:36, 26:197, 28:52-53, 29:46-47. For Muhammad’s audience’s dependence on scriptures to contextualize the qur’ānic-biblical material, see Norman Calder, “From Midrash to scripture: The sacrifice of Abraham in early Islamic tradition,” in The Qur’an: Formative Interpretation, ed. Andrew Rippin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988), 81-108. 277 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 491. 278 Ibid., 491-7. This has been iterated by other scholars as well, such as in Griffith, “Christian lore.”

The presence of Christian communities in and around Arabia in late antiquity is well attested and extensively discussed in scholarship.279 Christianity in particular regions, like north-west or south Arabia, was manifested as durable and institutionally established; whereas, in others most likely had more fluid contours, recognizable as a form of veneration of Jesus and the Cross.280 Regardless of the form of Christianity, however, these communities produced, developed and elaborated on a prophetic folklore consisting of stories of biblical prophets and extra-biblical saints.281 Stories of ancient Arab prophets and heroes were also integral parts of this lore, which found expressions through different oral and written means.282 The fact that there is no strong evidence for the existence of an

Arabic version of any gospels before the ninth century does not necessitate that Muhammad

(or any other preacher in Arabia) was unlikely to know the biblical narratives.283 It is

279 Henri Lammens, Les sanctuaires préislamites dans l’Arabie occidentale (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1926); Francois Nau, Les arabes chrétiens de Mésopotamie et Syria du VIIe au VIIIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1933); H. Charles, Le christianisme des arabes nomads sur le limes et dans le desert syro-mésopotamien aux alentours de l’hégire (Paris: Leroux, 1936); John Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (Beirut: Longman, 1979); E. Rabbath, L’orient chrétien à la veille de l’islam (Beirut: Université Libanaise, 1980); Irfan Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1984); idem., Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1989); idem., Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1995); René Tardy, Najrân: Chrétiens d’Arabie avant l’islam (Beirut: Dar al-Machreq, 1999); Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 7ff; Isabel Toral-Niehoff, “The ʿĪbād of al-Ḥīra: An Arab Christian community in late antique Iraq,” in Qur’ān in Context, eds. Neuwirth, Siani and Marx, 323-48; Philip Wood, “Christianity and the Arabs in the sixth century,” in Inside and Out: Interactions between Rome and the Peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian Frontiers in Late Antiquity, eds. G. Fisher and J. Djikstra (Peeters, 2014), 353-68. 280 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 259-64; Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 252, et passim. One should, however, be careful not to develop an overly simplistic view of Christianity in these regions. 281 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 252-4. 282 Ibid., 144-6, 252-4. 283 Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur (Vatican City, 1944), 1:36ff; Griffith, Bible in Arabic; Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 492; Abbott, Papyri, 47ff.

89 argued that there were, at least partial, lectionary books and private biblical writings in

Arabic before Islam.284 More frequently, however, many of the biblical-hagiographical stories circulated orally, in liturgical as well as non-liturgical contexts, and Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation often included such stories. Al-Azmeh argues that “[b]iblical and apocryphal material […] obeyed the requirements of the Qur’ān itself, and its occasions of declamation and composition. […] It is not the availability of Biblical and similar material that accounts for their Qur’ānic presence, but the requirements of the new scripture in process of composition which led to appropriation.”285 It is crucial for our understanding of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation and storytelling to also recognize his employment of this biblical lore for his own mission.286

1.3. The functions of storytelling in Muhammad’s prophetic career

For the context of qur’ānic recitation, the question of the functions of Muhammad’s storytelling is epistemologically not different than asking what the functions of narratives in the Qur’ān are, about which there is abundant scholarship. 287 Nevertheless, it is important to consider these narratives out of their static places in the Qur’ān, and approach them as instances of a continuous public performance. The shift of focus from text as a

284 Anton Baumstark, “Das Problem eines vorislamischen christich-arabischen Schrifttums in arabischer Sprache,” Islamica 4 (1931): 562ff; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 24-27; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 6. Christopher Buck briefly points out that some qur’ānic prophetic narratives are different than the narratives found in the previous scriptures. This approach neglects the impact of extra-scriptural hagiographical traditions and oral transmission of narratives. Christopher Buck “Discovering,” in WBCQ, 31-32. Note the extensive quotation from the Palestinian Syriac lectionary in the Sīra. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 103-4. 285 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 493-4. 286 Al-Azmeh emphasizes the “new context of sentiments, topoi, stories and ideas” for which this biblical knowledge was utilized. Ibidem. 287 See the section “Storytelling in the Qur’ān” above, pp. 66ff.

90 complete object to narrative as a textualized performance greatly enhances our understanding of Muhammad’s prophetic career, as well as mechanisms of storytelling in antiquity in broader terms. Moreover, bringing in ḥadīth and other non-qur’ānic literature in which Muhammad is represented as a narrator of stories is crucial for complementing and improving this analysis, since the relationship between Muhammad and the Qur’ān is not clear from the Qur’ān itself. Muhammad’s storytelling, a significant aspect of his prophetic preaching, played an indispensable role in 1) exhortation, 2) mythopoiesis through creating typologies, self-relating, developing etiologies, and damnatio memoriae, and 3) qur’ānic-biblical exegesis.

The qur’ānic discourse develops a prophetology according to which messengers of

God narrate God’s signs as examples and instructions to people,288 a prophetology very much a continuation of the biblical milieu.289 Both Muhammad and ancient prophets are depicted as narrators and interpreters of stories in the Qur’ān. For example, in sūrat al- aʿrāf the Qur’ān says, “O children of Adam, if there come to you messengers from among you relating to you my signs (yaquṣṣūn ʿalaykum āyāti), then whoever fears Allah and reforms – there will be no fear concerning them, nor will they grieve.”290 In sūrat ghāfir,

Moses (or a believer in his community) relates the story of Noah, Joseph and other prophets to the crowd before Pharaoh, who plots to throw Moses into fire.291 These representations

288 Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 24; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 33ff; Griffith, “Sunna of our messengers,” 207ff. 289 Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 53-84; Neuwirth, Koran, 498-501; cf. Matt. 13:10-17. Tarif Khalidi says, “In jahili poetry narration defers to moralizing, an attitude not without relevance to the later Quranic conception of history.” Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 4. 290 Q7:35. 291 Q40:23-46.

91 emphasize the pietistic practice of hagiographical storytelling (hagiodiegesis) in antiquity; narrating stories of saintly figures made the narrator not only a performer but also an interpreter and exhorter, requiring the attention, imitation, and participation of the audience. To narrate, in religious context, is an action-generating verb, since it invokes the audience to imitate an example or reflect on a lesson.292 Characters in the qur’ānic stories of ancient prophets and saints, as Fred Donner states, were “moral paradigms, emblematic of all who are good and evil.”293 And the Qur’ān attests to this exemplary role of stories with verses such as, “and we have certainly presented to the people in this Qur’ān from every example.”294 Muhammad was a storyteller partly in this sense of the term, a narrator of biblical-hagiographical stories, exhorting and admonishing the audience on ancient prophets’ and saints’ piety and perseverance for the spiritual formation of his listeners, like his biblical predecessors had done.295 This image has been reinforced with the voluminous

ḥadīth literature that records, collects, sorts and organizes the extra-qur’ānic stories

Muhammad narrated for religious rulings about piety, ritual purity, ritual practice, among others.

His exhortation, including vivid descriptions of the punishments of those who disbelieved in the divine message, also functioned as admonition for the audiences of

292 John Searle, “How performatives work,” in Essays in Speech Act Theory, eds. Daniel Vanderveken and Susumu Kubo (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002), 86ff. For narration as piety, see Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 65-7; Claudia Rapp, “Safe-conducts to heaven: Holy men, mediation and the role of writing,” in Transformations of Late Antiquity, eds.Rousseau and Papoutsakis, 187-204; Abboud, Mary in the Qur’an, 50-1. 293 Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 84; Kenneth Cragg, Event of the Qur’ān: Islam in Its Scripture (Oxford: Oneworld, 1994), 158. 294 Q30:58. 295 For performative character of the qur’ānic event see Neuwirth, “Structure,” 145-55.

Muhammad, who was called a nadhīr (the one who warns) numerous times in the

Qur’ān.296 The last 14 verses at the end of sūrat al-qamar, for example, openly warn

Muhammad’s audience “that those who reject his message could suffer the same fate as the peoples of the punishment-stories.”297 This locution has been commented upon by many scholars, who argue for the eschatological character of Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation, although the degree to which eschatology is emphasized in the Qur’ān is a matter of debate.298 For our purposes, it is sufficient and significant to point out that hagiographical storytelling was as much a mirror for the future as it was a narrative of the past. Prolepses into the post-apocalyptic future, with stories vividly depicting the heaven and hell, as well as narrating the dramatic dialogues between the dwellers of the heaven and those of hell,299 were important components of the narrative landscape of the Qur’ān, and of Muhammad’s storytelling. The following passage is an example:

And the companions of the Garden will call out to the companions of the Fire, “We have found what our Lord promised us to be true. Have you found what your Lord promised to be true?” They will say, “Yes.” And a crier amongst them will proclaim, “God’s curse is on the wrong-doers, who bar [men] from God’s path and seek to make it crooked and who do not believe in the next world.” Between the two groups is a barrier; and on the heights are men who recognize each [of them] by their marks; and they call out to the companions of the Garden, “Peace be on you! They have not entered it, though they long [to do so].” And when their eyes are turned towards the companions of the Fire, they say, “Our Lord, do not place us with the people who do wrong.” And the companions of the

296 Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 104-5. For example, Q5:19, 7:184, 11:2, 15:89, 25:1&56, 26:115, 34:28&44, 35:23-24, 38:70, 41:4, 48:8, 53:56, 67:26, 71:2, 79:45. 297 Q54; Welch, “Formulaic features,” 82. 298 David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2002); idem., “The beginnings of Islam as an apocalyptic movement,” Journal of Millenial Studies 1 (2001), http://www.mille.org/publications/winter2001/cook.html; Neuwirth, Scripture, 76ff; Shoemaker, Death of a Prophet, 118ff; Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 79-80; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 66. 299 Some of the examples are found in sūras Q14, 16, 40, 35, 55, 56, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 88.

heights call out to men whom they recognize by their marks, saying, “Your gathering [of wealth] has not availed you, nor the pride you have displayed. Are these the ones you swore God would not reach with mercy? [To those given mercy it will be said,] “Enter Garden. There will be no fear on you, nor will you grieve.” And the companions of the Fire call out to the companions of Paradise, “Pour some water on us or some of that God has provided for you.” They reply, “God has forbidden both of them to those who do not believe, who took their religion as diversion and sport and who were deluded by the life of this world.” Today We forget them as they forgot that they would meet this day of their and as they used to deny our signs. (Q7:44-51)

In Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamations, in the eyes of Muslims, God exhorts and admonishes through Muhammad. Nevertheless, the ḥadīth tradition attests and emphasizes that Muhammad was an exhorter and an admonisher also in his non-qur’ānic public performances. For example, in the variants of one report from the Muṣannaf (topically arranged ḥadīth collection) of Ibn Abī Shayba (d. 849), one of the earliest collectors of

ḥadīth, Muhammad was referred to as a storyteller (qāṣṣ) and a public admonisher

(mudhakkir).300 In another report from the same collection, a Companion of Muhammad,

Aws b. Ḥudhayfa al-Thaqafī (d.678), said: “We sat with the Messenger of God, and he gave qaṣaṣ and admonished us.”301 In some reports Muhammad is described as holding qaṣaṣ sessions, but the content of the reports is often about ritual legislation or other religious rulings, and the nature or content of his public address, despite being defined as

300 Robson, “Ḥadīth,” in EI2; C. Pellat, “Ibn Abī S̲ h̲ ayba,” in EI2; Ibn Abī Shayba, Al-kitāb al- muṣannaf fī al-aḥādith wal-āthār [Collection of Reports and Traditions], ed. ʿUmar ibn Gharāmah al-ʿAmrawī (al-ʿUlayyā, al-Riyāḍ: Dār ʿālam al-kutub, 1988), 5:289. Discussed in Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 193. 301 Quoted in ibidem.

94 qaṣaṣ, is not specified. 302 In one report, Muhammad’s conversation with one of the

Companions, Abū al-Dardā’ (d. 652), about the exegesis of sūrat al-raḥmān, is referred to as qaṣaṣ.303 It is not clear from the report whether the qur’ānic recitation of this sūra or its interpretation qualifies this conversation as qaṣaṣ.

These reports, Armstrong underlines, tell less about the nature of Muhammad’s public speech than the overlapping connotations of the two practices (qaṣaṣ and dhikr) in the ninth century, to which the variants are dated.304 Nevertheless, the qur’ānic discourse demonstrates that this overlap was most likely present during Muhammad’s time. In fact, in the Qur’ān, dhikr, which generally is translated as “remembrance” in qur’ānic and other contexts,305 is often used to denote stories – remembering past stories as a way of warning for the future. For instance, in sūrat maryam, God’s mercy to Zachariah, and in sūrat ibrāhīm, Moses’ warning his people against the Day of Judgement are narrated after the word dhikr.306 Therefore, it is tenable to argue that storytelling and admonishing were overlapping practices in Muhammad’s time, as it was in the following centuries, and he fulfilled these roles through both his qur’ānic recitation and non-qur’ānic speech.

According to the following report, for example, Muhammad narrates about prophet

Abraham on the Day of Resurrection, a post-apocalyptic story that is not in the Qur’ān, but

302 Ibid., 235. For the reports in which Muhammad praises quṣṣāṣ, see Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 99-106. For Muhammad preaching women, see Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 1, book 3, §97-B, §101. Note that the verb qaṣṣa is not used in these reports. 303 Q55; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 191-2; A. Jeffery, “Abu ’l-Dardā’,” in EI2. 304 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 4, 135-146. 305 A. Brodersen, “Remembrance,” in EI2. 306 Q14:5, 19:2.

95 completes the many qur’ānic narratives of Abraham, pointing at the continuous and interfleunced nature of Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation and other public addresses:

Narrated Abū Hurayra: The Prophet said, “On the Day of Resurrection Abraham will meet his father Āzar whose face will be dark and covered with dust. Abraham will say (to him): ‘Did not I tell you not to disobey me?’ His father will reply: ‘Today I will not disobey you.’ Abraham will say: ‘O Lord! You promised me not to disgrace me on the Day of Resurrection; and what will be more disgraceful to me than cursing and dishonoring my father?’ Then Allah will say (to him): ‘I have forbidden paradise for the disbelievers.’ Then he will be addressed, ‘O Abraham! Look! What is underneath your feet?’ He will look and there will see a Ḏhabḥ (an animal) blood-stained, which will be caught by the legs and thrown in the Fire.”307

Let us look at another ḥadīth report in which Muhammad tells an extra-qur’ānic story for exhortation purposes. In variants of a report transmitted on the authority of the abovementioned Abū Hurayra, Muhammad narrates the story of Jurayj.308 According to the tradition, Jurayj was an ascetic, living and praying in solitude in a cell, refusing his mother’s calls to come to her. His mother gets angry at him and sends a prostitute to seduce him. The woman is unable to interrupt Jurayj’s asceticism and goes to a shepherd in order to become pregnant with a child. She claims the child is Jurayj’s son, but the infant speaks and declares that he is the shepherd’s son.

The narrative in this ḥadīth involves some familiar tropes from late antique hagiography, such as withdrawal from society in expense of family ties, overcoming seduction, revealing of truth via miracle. The parallelisms between the Islamic Jurayj story

307 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, §569; cf. Q6:74-83, 9:114, 14:35-41, 19:41-50, 29:16-27, 60:4-5. J. Robson, “Abū Hurayra,” in EI2. 308 Sean Anthony, “Jurayj” in EI3. The ḥadīth is, among others, in the Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al- Razzāq Sanʿānī, ed. Ḥabīb al-Raḥmān al-Aʿẓamī (Beirut, 1983), 11:135.

96 and a passage in the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus, where a prostitute tries to seduce the holy man in vain, has been pointed out in scholarship.309 Despite the onomastic similarity between the Christian and the Islamic story (George – Jurayj), the emplotments are in fact quite different. George, not removed by the woman, accepts her false monetary claims before God reveals the truth. Whereas, the woman in the story of Jurayj accuses him of fornication before the infant miraculously reveals the truth and declares that his father is not Jurayj. Despite the absence of a vorlage for the Islamic story of Jurayj, the example indicates that Muhammad was remembered in the community to have narrated non- qur’ānic/biblical stories, which participated in the broader hagiographical language of late antiquity, for exhortation purposes.

In addition to exhorting and admonishing, prophetic and hagiographical stories

Muhammad narrated were tools for Islamic mythopoiesis, developing his image as a prophet, typologically complying with the ancient prophets whose stories, image, and persona were recited and developed through the continuous qur’ānic proclamation. Arthur

Jeffery, Rudi Paret, Michael Zwettler, among others, demonstrate how prophetic narratives in the Qur’ān constituted, if loosely, topoi of prophethood which Muhammad fit and culminated.310 The “qur’ānic accounts of prior messengers and prophets,” in Zwettler’s

309 Josef Horovitz, Spuren griechischer Mimen im Orient (Berlin 1905), 87-83; Anthony, “Jurayj,” EI3; BHO, 355-56; Michael Slusser, trans., Gregory Thaumaturgus. Life and Works, The Fathers of the Church 98 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 47-48. For the Syriac version, see AMS 6 (1896): 83-106. For a brief overview of the reception history of this ḥadīth in Islam, see Anthony, “Jurayj” EI3. Forcing one’s son into marriage is also a well-known trope in Christian hagiography, seen, among others, in the aforementioned Life of the Man of God. Doran, “Man of God,” 18. 310 Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 36ff; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran, 89-91; Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 96-115. Also see, Heribert Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” in Die Islamische Welt zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit, eds. Ulrich Haarman and Peter Bachmann (Beirut: Wiesbaden, 1979): 56-80; Neuwirth, Scripture, 292, 394-5; idem, “Locating the Qur’an and early Islam in the ‘epistemic space’ of late antiquity,” in Islam and Its Past, eds. Bakhos and

97 words, “are expressly intended to be understood as typological prefigurements and representations of which the person of Muhammad, Prophet and Messenger of God, provide the corresponding recapitulation and fulfillment – the antitype.”311 Repetition of these typologies through storytelling, under various names of biblical and non-biblical prophets, elucidated and reinforced the Islamic notion of prophethood, embodied by

Muhammad, for his audiences.

Creating and reinforcing typologies can be construed as the first step of the qur’ānic mythopoiesis, after which came self-relating. Muhammad’s recitation of qur’ānic stories of ancient prophets functioned as hermeneutical aids for contextualizing, typifying, and clarifying his personal experiences.312 “What happens in the real world of the community mirrors what already happened in the biblical world.”313 For example, as Neuwirth argues,

Muhammad’s recital of the Moses story in sūrat al-nāziʿāt, narrating the prophet’s call to mission, his confrontation with Pharaoh, and the punishment of the latter by God,314 was a hermeneutical process for contextualizing his own rejection in Mecca, especially the challenge by the cult of the three deities, Manāt, al-Lāt and al-ʿUzza, attested in sūrat al-

Cook, 165-185; idem, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 191ff; Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 25-26. 311 Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 97. Note that al-Azmeh finds this to be an anachronistic ascription. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 494 fn. 381. 312 Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’ān, 133-4; Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 98. The self- relating is also witnessed by the reports in the Sīra, where Muhammad narrates about himself, relating his prophethood to the previous biblical prophets. For example, see Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 72. 313 Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 192. 314 Q79:15-26.

98 najm.315 Her analysis of the qur’ānic depictions of Moses demonstrates that Muhammad became a second Moses through his qur’ānic recitation of the biblical prophet.316

Similarly, in the Medinan sūrat al-taḥrīm, Muhammad’s recitation of the stories of believing and disbelieving women from the biblical lore appears to have functioned as a hermeneutical process for one of his own family situations. “When the Prophet confided a certain matter to one of his wives, but she divulged it, and God showed it to him, he made known part of it and held back part of it. When he informed her of it, she said, ‘Who informed you of this?’ He replied, ‘The Knower, the Aware informed me.’”317 After reciting this pericope about a personal anecdote, Muhammad’s recitation addresses and exhorts the audience on repentance, through the stories of Noah’s and Lot’s wives, both betraying women, and the stories of the believing wife of Pharaoh, as well as Mary, are brought to fore:

God has coined an example for those who disbelieve: the wife of Noah and the wife of Lot. They were married to two righteous servants of ours, but they betrayed them; so [their husbands] were of no avail to them against God. They were told, “Enter the Fire with those who are entering.” And God has coined an example for those who believe: the wife of Pharaoh when she said, “My Lord, build for me a house with you in the Garden and deliver me from Pharaoh and his work, and deliver me from the people who do wrong;” and Mary, the daughter of ʿImrān, who guarded her private parts; and we breathed into it some of our spirit, and she counted true the words of her Lord and His scriptures and was one of the obedient. (Q66:10- 12)

315 Q53; Neuwirth, Scripture, 283-5. Muhammad is called the brother of Moses, “following his religion, being sent with the same mission” by a Jew in the Sīra; Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 240-41, 256. The connection of Muhammad to Moses was also extensively argued in Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 16-20. 316 Neuwirth, Koran, 653-71; Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 98; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 494. 317 Q66:3.

The fuller stories of Noah’s and Lot’s people, as disbelievers and betrayers, were narrated and developed in the Meccan period.318 In the above-quoted Medinan sūra, we see that the images of these disbelieving family members, whose eternal punishment

Muhammad’s audience was now well familiar with, were recited to contextualize

Muhammad’s family affairs. The exegetical tradition provides diverse accounts as to what secret, which two wives of Muhammad revealed to whom.319 Despite the unclarity of the details, such intratextual reading of the Qur’ān points to the function of storytelling in the second level of qur’ānic mythopoiesis, namely, relating Muhammad’s experiences to the prophetic typologies with which his audience was assumed to be familiar.

The third step of the mythopoiesis process was replacing the biblical myth.

Muhammad’s recitation of the stories of ancient prophets and saints served as an exegesis that resulted in damnatio memoriae and creation of new memories and etiologies through reinterpretation and recontextualization of the prophetic, saintly, and heroic personae.320

The knowledge of biblical prophets and heroes were possibly limited to general outlines of their stories in Arabia, as pointed out above. Muhammad’s public speech brought to fore the names of Abraham, Moses, Noah, Joseph, Mary and others, and attributed to them new

318 Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 40-43. 319 Ibid., 96, 99-100. 320 For an extensive discussion of damnatio memoriae, see Eric Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004).

100 stories,321 often merging them into one collective persona,322 or into his own prophetic experience. As Muhammad became the culmination of the prophetic archetype, he also became the face and sound of the biblical names,323 their pre-Islamic stories, if known at all, becoming more ambiguous.

Ḥadīth reports in which Muhammad likens himself and some of his prominent companions to ancient prophets indicate the continuation of this process. For instance, in the Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī (d. 870) there are a number of reports in which Muhammad physically likens himself to Abraham, in one of them directly saying, “if you want to see Abraham, then look at [me].”324 In the Ṣaḥīfa325 of Hammām b. Munabbih (d. 719), one of the early traditionists from south Arabia,326 Muhammad is reported to emphasize the similarity and

321 The oft-cited example is the passages that mention Abraham’s building the temple in Mecca, mentioned in Q3:95-97, more extensively in Q2:127-150. Brief mention of rites of pilgrimage and sacrifice are found in Q22:25-36. For a discussion of this mytopoiesis, see Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 12. 322 This is a common function of Christian hagiography observed in collective saints’ lives. Patricia Cox Miller, “Strategies of representation in collective biography: Constructing the subject as holy,” in Greek Biography, 209-54. A clear manifestation of the collective persona of the ancient prophets is seen in Q14:9-15, where the prophets are referred as “they” and one generic story is narrated for “their peoples;” also, there is an anonymous prophet with a generic story in Q23:32-41, and in 36:13-29. 323 For “face” as a performative unit, see Shepherd, Performance Theory, 4ff. 324 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, §574; also see ʿAbdul Ḥamīd Ṣiddīqī, trans., Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2000), kitāb al-īmān, §322, §328. Such physical resemblances to ancient prophets are also known from the monastic-folkloric literature of the Egyptian desert. Georgia Frank, “Miracles, monks, and monuments: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto as pilgrims’ tales,” in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, ed. David Frankfurter (Leiden; Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998), 485, 498, 501. Frank argues that such attributions to living holy men connected them to the biblical past and the Egyptian present, and made them “monuments” in the landscape. Ibid., 503-4. 325 Collection of ḥadīth, lit. “page.” A. Ghédira, “Ṣaḥīfa,” in EI2. 326 For Hammām’s connection to later transmitters and collectors of ḥadīth, see Marston Speight, “A look at variant readings in the ḥadīth,” Der Islam 77 (2000): 169-79.

101 proximity between Jesus and himself.327 In a variant report, Muhammad says “I saw Jesus,

Son of Mary, and I saw nearest in resemblance with him was ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd [a

Companion of Muhammad].” 328 The broader context of many of these reports is

Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem, after which, reports emphasize, Muhammad narrated to his community all of the prophets he saw as he ascended to the presence of

God. 329 They are relevant, nevertheless, in that they participate in the process of reimagining ancient prophets in early Islam that began with Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation and his storytelling. As Tottoli argues, Muhammad’s mentioning of biblical figures in the ḥadīth literature “has as its main function the definition of the role of

Muhammad in relation to the Biblical prophets.” 330 This was not, however, the sole function.

Reciting, narrating, and reinterpreting stories of biblical prophets and saints,

Muhammad was also a public biblical-qur’ānic exegete, contributing to the oral biblical haggadah.331 Scholars have pointed out the public exegetical narratives filtering through confessional boundaries and possibly having found their way into the Qur’ān and its

327 Muhammad Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih: The Earliest Extant Work on the Hadith, trans. Muhammad Rahimuddin (Paris: Centre Culturel Islamique, 1979), 146 §132; a variant in Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, §651. 328 Ṣiddīqī, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, kitāb al-īmān, §321, §328; C.E. Bosworth, “ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd,” in EI2. 329 B. Schrieke, et al., “Miʿrād̲ j̲ ,” in EI2; Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 181-7; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 114-117. Note that there are two versions of the story of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem, with and without the ascension to heaven. 330 Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 111. 331 Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 189, 195-6; idem., Scripture, 322-24; Gerald Hawting, “The tawwābūn, atonement and the ʿāshūrā,” JSAI 17 (1995), 170; Gordon Newby, “The drowned son: Midrash and midrash making in in the Qur’ān and tafsīr,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, eds. W. M. Brinner and S. D. Ricks (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 19-32. For the Qur’ān as interpreted Bible see, Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 95ff; for the oral Torah, see Willem Smelik, Rabbis, Language and Translation in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 220-65.

102 hermeneutics.332 Yet, one should conceptualize Muhammad’s public speech not only as utilizing these folk interpretations, but generating, expanding, and conversing with them.333

This is externally attested in the ostensibly seventh-century Armenian Chronicle of Sebeos, in which Muhammad is reported to have been well-acquainted with the story of Moses.334

The voluminous corpus of reports from the Islamic tradition, which represents Muhammad as telling extra-qur’ānic stories of prophets and saints, also affirms Muhammad’s biblical- exegetical storytelling. The literary expressions of Muhammad’s extra-qur’ānic speech about biblical events and persons are often different than the qur’ānic discourse. And we can connect this, in addition to the generic differences between the two forms of writing, to the fact that the Qur’ān is a recitation of a particular memory of biblical events and persons, whereas the ḥadīth often functioned as a hermeneutical tool for qur’ānic and biblical stories.335 Both modes of expression contributed to Muhammad’s public exegesis, of the Bible or the Qur’ān, depending on the audience’s knowledge of the scriptures.

For example, in the Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī, Muhammad is reported to have narrated the following story, a dialogue between Adam and Moses:

Narrated Abū Hurayra: Allah’s Messenger said, “Adam and Moses argued with each other. Moses said to Adam, ‘You are Adam whose mistake expelled you from paradise.’ Adam said to him, ‘you are Moses whom Allah selected as His Messenger and as the one to whom He spoke directly; yet you blame me for a thing which had

332 Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 270; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 283. Islamic tradition later pejoratively refers to these interpretations as public exegesis (tafsīr al-nās). Note that the Qur’ān mentions people who know the Book through hearsay, in Q2:78. For some preliminary discussions on public exegesis, see Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 29; Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 203. 333 Neuwirth, Scripture, 322-24. 334 Quoted in Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 6-7; they argue for the reliability of Sebeos’s historical account in p.7-8. 335 Berg, Development of Exegesis, 65-92.

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already been preordained for me by Allah before my creation?’ Allah’s Messenger said twice, ‘So Adam overpowered Moses.’336

There is no dialogue between Adam and Moses in the Qur’ān, but this brief ḥadīth gives us a broader narrative context for the many qur’ānic passages where the stories of Adam and Moses are narrated immediately following each other.337 A particular variant of this dialogue is interesting in that it depicts Moses as having the knowledge of everything;338 whereas, in the Qur’ān, Adam is given such all-encompassing knowledge.339 In other variants, however, it is phrased as Moses receiving the Torah before Adam was created.

The variations in the tradition notwithstanding, the possible conversation of this ḥadīth with the qur’ānic discourse is interesting. Although the intricate relationship between the development of exegesis and of ḥadīth is beyond the scope of this chapter, I find it useful to briefly turn to the Qur’ān here. In sūrat al-baqara, where Adam is given the knowledge of everything in paradise, briefly after this episode, the People of Israel are addressed, and the story of Moses is narrated, with a frequent employment of the second person plural pronoun.340 The above ḥadīth, assuming that Muhammad indeed narrated such a story, participates in the hermeneutics of these two qur’ānic-biblical characters, and in the conversation of Muhammad with his Jewish audiences about the legitimacy of Moses and the claims of his superiority over other prophets including Muhammad. The other ḥadīth

336 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, § 621; also in Muhammad Tufay Ansari, trans., Sunan Ibn Mājah (Lahore: Kazi, 1993), vol. 1, chapter 10, §80. 337 Q2:29-38 (Adam), Q2:49-74 (Moses), Q5: 27-32 (Adam), Q5:20-26 (Moses), Q17:61-65 (Adam), Q17:1-1-106 (Moses), Q20:115-123 (Adam), Q20:9-98 (Moses). 338 Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih, 124 (§45). 339 Q2:31-33. 340 Q2:40-74.

104 reports about Moses in the same book of the Ṣaḥīḥ point to this new theological, discursive context, for there are many reports contesting Moses.341

According to some ḥadīth reports, Muhammad narrated biblical stories which he did not recite as a part of the qur’ānic proclamation. For example, in the following report he participates in the public exegetical tradition of the story of the Judgement of Solomon, with an abbreviated yet close version of the story:

Narrated Abū Hurayra: “Allah’s Apostle said: ‘There were two women, each of whom had a child with her. A wolf came and took away the child of one of them, whereupon the other said, “It has taken your child.” The first said, “But it has taken your child.” So, they both carried the case before David who judged that the living child be given to the elder lady. So, both of them went to Solomon the son of David and informed him (of the case). He said, “Bring me a knife so as to cut the child into two pieces and distribute it between them.” The younger lady said, “May Allah be merciful to you! Don’t do that, for it is her (i.e. the other lady’s) child.” So, he gave the child to the younger lady.”342

I will fully quote the biblical version of the story here:

Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him [Solomon]. One of them said, “Pardon me, my lord. This woman and I live in the same house, and I had a baby while she was there with me. The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us. “During the night this woman’s son died because she lay on him. So, she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t the son I had borne.” The other woman said, “No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours.” But the first one insisted, “No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine.” And so, they argued before the king. The king said, “This one says, ‘My son is alive, and your son is dead,’ while

341 For example, see Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 5, book 58, §227, §229; vol. 5, book 59, §288, et al. 342 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, §637.

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that one says, ‘No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.’” Then the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So, they brought a sword for the king. He then gave an order: “Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other.” The woman whose son was alive was deeply moved out of love for her son and said to the king, “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!” Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” When all Israel heard the verdict the king had given, they held the king in awe, because they saw that he had wisdom from God to administer justice.343

Solomon’s character is developed as a wise and just king in the Qur’ān.344 In sūrat al-anbiyā, for example, Solomon and David judge concerning the fields of two men,345 and in sūrat al-naml, he is again portrayed as a just king with esoteric knowledge and wisdom.346 The story of the two women that Muhammad narrates, however, is not found in the Qur’ān, although it is a well-known episode in the biblical tradition.347 Muhammad’s version of the story closely parallels the biblical version, except for minor variations in detail. For example, the women are not called prostitutes in his version; and the baby is snatched by a wolf. In the lack of a context, it is difficult to reconstruct the occasion in which Muhammad narrated this extra-qur’ānic story. But this narrative, closely echoing

343 1 Kings 3:16-28. 344 Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran, 266-279; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 35-38. 345 Q21:78-79. 346 Q27:7-44. 347 Phyllis Bird, “The harlot as heroine: Narrative art and social presuppositions in three Old Testament texts,” Semeia 46 (1989): 119-39; Willem A. M. Beuken, “No wise king without a wise woman (I Kings III 16–28),” in New Avenues in the Study of the Old Testament: A Collection of Old Testament Studies, Published on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Oudtestamentisch Werkgezelschap and the Retirement of Prof. Dr. M. J. Mulder, ed. A. S. van der Woude (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 1–10; Mordechai Cogan, 1 Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 193-97.

106 the biblical version, is in line with the qur’ānic representation of Solomon as a wise and just king.

Ḥadīth reports in which Muhammad uses phrases and proverbs known from the biblical realm are well-known.348 The above ḥadīth, which contains the full narrative of

King Solomon, points at narrative transmission, and not at “borrowing” of phraseology. Of course, this and such ḥadīth reports might be falsely attributed to Muhammad or Abū

Hurayra at a later time.349 Nevertheless, their preservation in the tradition shows that

Muhammad was remembered to have participated in the broader biblical milieu not only with his qur’ānic preaching, but also his extra-qur’ānic speech and storytelling. While he was an active participant of the broader scriptural universe, do changes in the details and emplotment of the stories always point at a polemical agenda?

The polemical discourse in the Qur’ān, which corrects and de-mythifies the biblical narratives, contributing to the abovementioned damnatio memoriae, should always be considered against the backdrop of ancient storytelling. 350 Not every omission in emplotment or alteration in vocabulary was intentional. Neuwirth, for example, argues that the verse “[Mary] withdrew from her people to an eastern place”351 “corrects” the biblical theology by muting the fact that in Christian theology Mary’s womb typologically corresponds to the eastern gate of the temple, which is not seen in the qur’ānic narrative.352

348 Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2: 346-362. 349 For transfer of authorship in early Islamic literature, see Mourad, Early Islam, 7-9, 11, 16, 80- 85, 88, 90. For reports falsely attributed to Muhammad, see Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:56-59, 145-163. 350 Sirry, “Qur’an and its polemical context,” 125-131; Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 29-33. 351 Q19:16. 352 Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 192.

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This sort of comparison, and the subsequent argumentum ex silentio, neglects the dynamics of storytelling in antiquity, and overemphasizes the agency of Muhammad in altering biblical narratives. His qur’ānic recitation and storytelling definitely offered new exegetical possibilities to biblical narratives and replaced some of the older ones. Yet, exegetical storytelling was a common practice in late antiquity, which resulted in many stories having been conflated and changed possibly before Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation began.353

He was a participant of this multivocal realm.

The early Islamic damnatio memoriae was not an overarching, monotypic discursive act towards all other monotheist and pagan communities in the Ḥijāz.

Muhammad and the early Islamic community around him had multifaceted approaches to

Christians and Christianity around them, and the Qur’ān testifies to this. For example, the qur’ānic attitude towards Jesus and those who believe in his message is generally positive.354 In the three mentions of Jesus’ disciples (al-ḥawāriyyūn) in three Medinan sūras, they are portrayed as true believers, rightly guided by God.355 Similarly, monks and ascetics are portrayed in positive light in the Qur’ān, a rhetorical distinction on which many scholars commented.356 I will further dwell on the issue of Islamic perception of Christians

353 The emphasis on the distinction between the pre-Muhammad and post-Muhammad time is impacted by Islamic historiography that makes this distinction due to its own conventions. This is discussed in Franz Rosenthal, “The influence of the biblical tradition on Muslim historiography,” in Historians of the Middle East, eds. Lewis and Holt, 39-40. 354 McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians, 6-7. 355 At the final verse of sūrat al-ṣaf (Q61:14) Muhammad recites: “O you who have believe, be God’s helpers, just as Jesus, son of Mary, said to his disciples: ‘Who are my helpers towards God?’ The disciples said, ‘We are God’s helpers.’ And a party fo the Children of Israel believed and another party did not believe. So we strengthened those who believed, and they prevailed.” The disciples are also mentioned in 5:110-119 and 3:52-53. Briefly discussed in McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians, 129-160, 261-2, 276, et passim. 356 McAuliffe, Qur’ānic Christians, 260-84.

108 in the forthcoming chapters, except to say here that the Islamic approach towards monasticism/asceticism, visible in the positive discourse in the Qur’ān, differed greatly from the Islamic approach and reaction to institutional Christianity. Thus, a discourse identified as polemical should always be paired with its literary and social context.

Muhammad’s prophetic career marks a significant period during which a group of stories of prophets, saints and heroes were continuously preached to a community over the course of approximately two decades. Although most of the stories, as well as the practice of admonishing through storytelling, were familiar to his audiences, his public speech constitutes a foundation for the perennial biblical-hagiographical transmissions from

Christianity (and from other religious traditions) to the early Islamic community, setting a novel Islamic discursive tone. Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation and other public speech included continuous storytelling, which exhorted and admonished his audiences, placed him in the lineage of biblical prophets, altered memories attributed to them, and participated in broader biblical exegetical conversations. The Qur’ān numerous times mentions Muhammad’s adversaries accusing him of being merely a poet, a soothsayer

(diviner, Arb.: kāhin), or possessed.357 Zwettler argues that this is an indication that divine revelation and inspiration by jinn 358 were probably not clearly distinguished by

357 For examples, see Q21:5, 36:69, 37:15-36, 52:29-30, 68:51, 69:41-42, 81:22, 83:13. These accusations presented and briefly discussed in Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 27-31. For pre- Islamic poetry referring to Christian myths, see Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 257; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 1:169. For soothsayers, see T. Fahd, “Kāhin,” in EI2. For an extensive treatment of such religious experts in the Roman Empire, see Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of the Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 358 Intelligent bodies composed of vapor or flame, imperceptible to human senses, yet able to affect humans; can be translated as daemons. D.B. MacDonald, et al., “Ḏj̲ inn,” in EI2.

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Muhammad’s contemporaries, since both forms of speech were similar to each other.359

Similarly, the frequent qur’ānic iteration that Muhammad was accused of merely narrating

“fables of those of old” indicates that, in terms of content, the social boundaries and distinctions among the various types of public narrators were probably not always well defined for his audiences. Muhammad was one of the public preachers in his community,360 if the most charismatic, establishing his and his Companions’ sanctity through the recitation and reinterpretation of the already-circulating knowledge about ancient prophets and holy men. To draw a broader picture, I now turn to the other voices in the early Islamic community.

1.4. Concluding remarks: Narrating stories after Muhammad

The Qur’ān reveals significant information about not only Muhammad’s public speech, but also the dynamics and mechanisms of the practice of storytelling in antiquity. Many verses mention the real or potential audience responses to Muhammad’s recitation, to which his biographical tradition attests. 361 The audiences in the Qur’ān sometimes take the

359 Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 81. Also see, Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 55-63; Sprenger, Leben und Die Lehre, I:207-268. 360 For people who received divine revelation in Muhammad’s community, see Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 44-46; Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 447-8. 361 A brief treatment of audiences as presented in the Qur’ān is in Neuwirth, “Structure,” 145ff. Also see idem., Scripture, 308-9, fn. 5. According to the Sīra, Muhammad’s early years in Mecca were replete with conversations, discussions and negotiations with his mostly Jewish audiences. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 239-270.

110 proclamation lightly;362 question Muhammad’s authority;363 inquire about the details of the qur’ānic stories, exhortations, and admonitions; accuse him (or other prophets) of lying;364 and they appear to have speculated about Muhammad’s sources of knowledge.365 Such audience responses, according to the qur’ānic discourse, were indications of opposition, acts of impiety and irreverence, and those who question were admonished and reprimanded for these acts. These qur’ānic passages, on the other hand, highlight inquisition, questioning, assessment, emotion, and other types of audience responses in the context of public speech in antiquity. As Averil Cameron extensively demonstrates for the Christian context, dialogue, questioning, contest, and debate were significant components of religious discourse and conversation in late antiquity.366 The representations of audiences in the Qur’ān indicate the presence of such late antique dynamics in the early Islamic era and point to a highly multivocal community around Muhammad. Ḥadīth literature also

362 Q6:10, 9:64-65, 21:41, 53:60, 70:42. Q86:13-14: “the Qur’ān is a decisive statement, and it is not amusement.” For episodes of Muhmmad being mocked by his listeners, see Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 143, 181, 187. For example, on p. 181: “I have heard that the apostle [Muhammad] passed by al-Walīd b. Mughīra and Umayya b. Khalaf and Abū Jahl b. Hishām and they reviled and mocked him, and caused him distress. So God sent down to him concerning this: ‘Apostles have been mocked before you, but that which they mocked at hemmed them in.’” 363 The criticism of irreverent behavior in Q77:48, “When they are told to bow, they do not bow.” Some other verses emphasizing the qur’ānic authority are Q53:1-11, 69:38-52, cf. Matt. 7:28-29. Q28:48: “But when the truth has come to them from us, they have said, ‘Why has he not been given the like of what was given to Moses?’ They say, ‘Two pieces of magic that support each other;’ and they say, ‘We do not believe in either.’” Also see the examples in Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 133-41, 181. 364 The verb kadhdhaba, “to accuse someone of lying,” in Q3:184, 6:34, 7:64, 7:92, 10:39, 10:73, 22:42, 23:26, 23:39, 29:18, 34:45, 35:4, 35:25, 54:9, 54:23, 78:28, 83:17, 91:11 et.al. 365 Q16:103 and 25:4-5; Gilliot, “Informants of the prophet,” passim; Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 180; Tafsīr Al-Ṭabarī, 7.648-650. For Muhammad being accused of hearing and adapting Jewish scriptures, see Lecker, “Zayd b. T̲ h̲ ābit,” EI2; idem., “Zayd B. Thābit,” 259-73. For a recent refutation of the argument of the so-called informants of Muhmmad, see Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 493ff. 366 Cameron, Dialoguing, 14, 23-38.

111 attests to this. In a report in the collection of Hammām b. Munabbih, Muhammad says:

“You will not cease putting question after question, until one of you would even say: ‘It is

God who created the creation, but who has created God?’”367

The multivocality involved not only the participation and response of the audiences to Muhammad’s preaching, but also multiple narrators of stories, as observed in the following verse:

They will say, “Three, and their dog was the fourth of them.” They will say, “five, and their dog the sixth of them,” guessing at the invisible. They will say, “Seven, and their dog the eighth of them.” Say, “My Lord is well aware of their number. Only a few know them.” So, dispute concerning them only on a clear issue; and do not ask any of them for an opinion about them. (Q18:22)

This qur’ānic verse refers to the story of the Companions of the Cave, and mentions people narrating different versions of the story, a few among whom knew the truth.368 The passage implies the various narrators of saints’ stories in the community around Muhammad, and the inquisitive nature of their audiences - how many people fell asleep in the cave?

Similarly, the Qur’ān also warns against disputing about Abraham. 369 These

367 Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih, 136 (§93). 368 aṣḥāb al-kahf, ostensibly a reiteration of the story known as the Youths/Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity. I will extensively analyze this sūra in the next chapter. 369 Q3:65-70. The various modes of engagement of audiences as a significant aspect of storytelling was emphasized in many reports in later literature. In one report, cited in Kitāb al- quṣṣāṣ, the audience corrects a detail in the storyteller’s narration: “ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad al-Ḥanafī said: “Abū Kaʿb the qāṣṣ said the following in the process of his storytelling one day: ‘The name of the wolf which slew Joseph was so and so.’ However, [the people in the assembly] replied: ‘The wolf never slew Joseph!’ He responded: ‘[I mean] that was the name of the wolf which did not slay Joseph.’” Ibn al-Jawzī gives this humorous episode as an example of storytellers who do not take their practice seriously. But the report also demonstrates what was possibly a frequent occurance, namely, an audience’s conversation with a storyteller about the details of the narrative. Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 196, §246.

112 representations point to the widespread practice of public hagiographical-exegetical storytelling, through which many stories, in various reiterations, were circulated, debated, and transmitted through many people with different levels of authority, a phenomenon to which we will return. The Qur’ān witnessed this multivocality, and participated in this milieu by incorporating, recontextualizing, and reinterpreting stories of prophets and saints. At the same time, the qur’ānic discourse and Muhammad’s life and persona themselves provided material for this aural milieu, appearing side-by-side with the biblical material in narrations of storytellers. I will first comment on the qur’ānic preaching as a mode of participation in the scriptural universe in late antiquity. Then, I will give a brief overview of the various narrators in the early Islamic community and their use of biblical and extra-biblical stories in their narrations. An overview of this multivocality is an essential background to the later hagiographical transmissions between Christianity and

Islam, to be extensively explored in the following two chapters.

Qur’ānic preaching precedes the Qur’ān. Qur’ānic preaching reached the communities outside of the Ḥijāz before the codification of the Qur’ān.370 In the Sīra it is told that a group of Companions, including ʿUbaydallah b. Jahsh and his Muslim wife, emigrated to Abyssinia.371 In Futūḥ al-buldān al-Balādhurī (d. 892) mentions Companions and their successors being given estates in Ascalon in Palestine.372 Abū al-Dardā’ (d. 652)

370 Goldziher, Arabic Literature, 30. Aziz al-Azmeh discusses the diffusion of new vocabulary and ritual practice, but does not mention the Qur’ān preaching in new regions and locations. Emergence of Islam, 368ff. For fragments of the Qur’ān in circulation, see ibid., 456ff. Also see, Crone and Cook, Meccan Trade, 221. 371 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 99. He converted to Christianity later on; Muhammad married his wife after he died. 372 Robert Schick, The Christian Communities in Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1996), 253.

113 is reported to go to Damascus during the reign of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634-44) to “teach the people the Book of their Lord and the Sunnah of the Prophet and pray with them.”373

Qatāda b. Diʿāma, a Successor, is remembered to have argued on Islamic topics based on teachings of the Torah in Basra.374 Likewise, Kurdūs b. al-ʿAbbās “used to read the pre-

Islamic Scriptures and speak about the Gospel and the Torah” in Kufa. 375 As these examples demonstrate, there was a continuous movement from the Ḥijāz towards the new frontiers of the Islamic state that enabled Islamic narratives being put in dialogue and appear side-by-side with Christian and Jewish preaching. This is an immensely important detail when we think about narratives in the Qur’ān and those about Muhammad reaching broad audiences. Since there was not a codified Qur’ān in this era, qur’ānic preaching and telling stories about Muhammad and its relation to this new proclamation was a practice mostly based on personal memory.

Who were the public speakers and narrators of stories in the early Islamic community? Roberto Tottoli identifies storytellers and converts as two “channels through which a growing mass of stories and legends on the creation of the world and the biblical prophets started to circulate among Muslims” from the time of Muhammad’s death.376

Andrew Bannister also argues for the extensive impact of storytellers in the shaping and circulation of the memory of Muhammad, as well as biblical stories, in the early Islamic

373 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 77. 374 Ibid., 93-94. For Qatāda, also see Pellat, “Ḳatāda b. Diʿāma,” in EI2. Successors/Followers, tābiʿūn, is the generation of Muslims that came after the Companions. Spectorsky, Susan A., “Tābiʿūn,” in EI2. 375 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 109, 156. 376 Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 86.

114 community.377 The argument is helpful in highlighting the popularity of storytellers and their narrations of “biblical stories” in early Islam. This approach, however, creates two misconceptualized dichotomies: It separates Muhammad’s life time from the post-

Muhammad transmissions; whereas, biblical knowledge and stories, as demonstrated above, had already been transmitted and circulated among Muhammad’s Muslim and non-

Muslim audiences. Moreover, Tottoli’s presentation of storytellers and converts as two distinct categories is misleading, for these two groups often overlapped during and after

Muhammad’s life time.378

To name a few of the prominent storytellers in the early Islamic community, the first caliph Abū Bakr (d. 634) is reported to be a storyteller, both narrating anecdotes about

Muhammad, and drawing material from pre-Islamic Arabian lore.379 The semi-legendary early convert Tamīm al-Dārī (d. 661), who was a Christian ascetic prior to his conversion, is also reported to have narrated stories of Muhammad, as well as Jewish and Christian ones;380 so did the Companion Abū al-Dardā’ (d. 652).381 Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 687), one of

377 Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 45-48; also see H. T. Norris, “Fables and Legends,” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. Ashtiany et al., 137-8; Watt, “The materials used by Ibn Isḥāq,” 25- 26. 378 Storytelling beyond the realm of “storytellers,” is also pointed out in Robinson, “History and heilsgeschichte,” 131-2. 379 Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-maʿārif [Book of Knowledge], ed. Tharwat ʻUkāshah (Misr: Dār al- maʿārif, 1969), 1:61. On Abū Bakr’s connection to pre-Islamic historiographical material, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 5. Abū Idrīs al-Khawlānī (d. 700), a judge and preacher in Damascus under the patronage of caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 705), is reported to have narrated on the ascetic practices of John the Baptist. Ibn Abī Shayba, Muṣannaf, 7:74; G.H.A. Juynboll, “al- K̲ h̲ awlānī,” in EI2; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 37. He is reported to have visited a Jewish school and engaged in religious debate in the Sīra of Ibn Ishaq. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 263. 380 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 289; Norris, “Fables and legends,” 139-41. For storytellers’ association with ascetics, see ibid., 146. The Qur’ān encourages believers to exhort one another (wa- tawāṣaw: “to urge one another to adopt or take up something, advice) in Q90:17, 103:3. 381 A. Jeffery, “Abu ’l-Dardāʾ,” in EI2; Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 103.

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Muhammad’s cousins, a Companion and one of the earliest Qur’ān scholars, named “the father of tafsīr,” was among the most well-known transmitters of reports.382 For example, according to the variants of one report, people say that a storyteller in Kufa is narrating about Moses and his companion mentioned in sūrat al-kahf,383 and they ask Ibn ʿAbbās about the correct version of the story; Ibn ʿAbbās narrates the whole story on the authority of Muhammad.384 Caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 644), according to reports, met Kaʿb al-

Aḥbār (a Jewish convert to Islam) in Jerusalem.385 He returned to Medina with this new convert and ordered Kaʿb to relate to the people of Medina what he read in the Jewish and

Christian scriptures. Kaʿb is in fact known for transmitting voluminous biblical material to

Islam, thoroughly cited in exegetical and historiographical works.386 ʿĀ’isha bint Abū Bakr

(d. 678) and Umm Salama (d. 683), two of Muhammad’s wives, as well as other female members of Muhammad’s family, are often depicted as telling stories about Muhammad, the circumstances under which he received revelation, and his interpretation of the various qur’ānic verses.387

382 L. Veccia Vaglieri, “ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās,” in EI2. 383 Q18:70-80. 384 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 95; Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 6, book 60, §250 “[…] O Abu ʿAbbās, […] There is a man at Kūfa who is a storyteller called Nauf, who claims that he (al-Khiḍr’s companion) is not Moses of Banī Isrāel. […].” In a similar report Ibn Masʿūd corrects a qāṣṣ’s interpretation of a qur’ānic verse, cited and discussed in Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 95. 385 Al-Wāqidī, Futūḥ al-Shām, 406; Moshe Perlmann, “A legendary story about Kaʿb al-Aḥbār’s conversion to Islam,” In The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, 1953), 85-99; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 287; M. Schmitz, “Kaʿb al-Aḥbār,” in EI2; Israel Wolfensohn, Kaʿb al-Aḥbār und seine Stellung im Ḥadīṯ und in der islamichen Legendenliteratur (Frankfurt, 1933). For Kaʿb and other Jewish converts, see Sarah Stroumsa, “On Jewish intellectuals who converted in the early Middle Ages,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity, ed. Daniel Frank (Leiden; New York; Köln: Brill, 1995), 179-198. 386 Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 89-96. 387 For some examples, see Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 69-73, 105, 107, 112; Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al- Bukhārī, vol. 1, book 1, §2; vol. 3, book 34, §414; vol. 3, book 44, §674; vol. 4, book 51, §25.

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Another narrator in the early Islamic community, according to the Sīra, was Salmān al-Fārisī, who had been allegedly instructed by a number of monks during his pre-Islamic religious experiences, and narrated his own story in the community around Muhammad.388

The trope of pre-Islamic monotheists often fulfilled a semiotic role in which they confirmed

Muhammad’s message and prophethood, to which we will return in Chapter 3.389 Their memory, on the other hand, was also a significant tool representing religious and cultural values of the time in which their hagiographical images were developed. Salmān’s story, fashioned as his own narration in the Sīra, emphasizes the practice of ascetics preaching stories to their audiences as a valuable symbol for the Islamic koiné of the eighth century, when Ibn Isḥāq collected material for the Sīra.

Storytelling was an ascetic, pietistic practice in late antiquity, and the early Islamic community was not an exception.390 Numerous reports emphasize the Companions of

For female Companions as exegetes and transmitters, see Asma Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Aisha Geissinger, Gender and Muslim Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2015); ʿAbd al-Hādī al-Faḍlī, Introduction to Ḥadīth, trans. Nazmina Virjee (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2002), 199-204. We also have at least one female storyteller from the later period, Umm al- Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, a servant of the aforementioned Umm Salama, who gave qaṣaṣ to women, on whom more below. For female Companions’ representations in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries, see Sprenger, Leben und Die Lehre, 3:61-87; Asma Asfaruddin, “Reconstituting women’s lives: Gender and the poetics of narrative in medieval biographical collections,” The Muslim World 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 461-80. 388 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 95-98; G. Levi Della Vida, “Salmān al-Fārisī,” in EI2; Robert Hoyland, “History, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of Islam,” in Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam, ed. Julia Bray (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 28; Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 130. 389 For the historicity of such monotheistic ascetics in the Islamic tradition, see Thomas Sizgorich, “Monks and their daughters,” in Muslims and Others in Sacred Space, ed. Margaret Cormack (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 193-216; idem., “Narrative and community,” 11-12, 27ff. 390 Quss b. Sāʿida is a prominent example of pre-Islamic ascetic-orators. He ostensibly lived before the time of Muhammad, and was a well known orator famous for his asceticism. The preservation of his memory demonstrates the attempts of Muslim historians to situate Arabia

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Muhammad as important figures at the intersection of piety and storytelling. In the time period immediately following Muhammad’s demise, scholars emphasize, the Islamic community remembered and preserved Muhammad’s lifetime and preaching through their narrations of him. Many Companions became storytellers,391 transmitting knowledge and historical information about Muhammad’s life events, practices and speeches, as well as about the interpretation of qur’ānic verses. In this process, biblical-hagiographical knowledge was transmitted to Islam in two forms: 1) In order to fill in the gaps of information in qur’ānic narratives, Companions and Successors appear to have consulted and narrated biblical-hagiographical stories. And 2) they narrated Muhammad’s life events by using forms of expression and tropes known from the broader scriptural and hagiographical realm. Let us look into these two modes of transmission.

According to the reports, Companions, Successors, and other storytellers in the early Islamic community often narrated qur’ānic passages and the exegetical stories associated with them, in and out of the Ḥijāz. The intricate relationship between storytellers and qur’ānic tafsīr is well-documented in scholarship, which will not be reiterated here.392

Yet I will highlight three modes of biblical storytelling for exegetical purposes in the early

Islamic community: Storyteller-exegetes sometimes directly related the biblical stories, as we saw in the examples above. In some cases, they appear to have expanded Muhammad’s comments and narrations. For example, according to a report, Ibn ʿAbbās narrates the story

within the broader ascetic realm of late antiquity, and attests to the close connection between asceticism and preacher. C. Pellat, “Ḳuss b. Sāʿida,” in EI2; Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 234. 391 Out of the 109 quṣṣāṣ Armstrong identifies until the year 750, 12 are Companions of Muhammad. 392 Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 3-4, 80-111, 198-9; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 14, 17ff; Mourad, Early Islam, 64, 80-82.

118 of Abraham and Hagar in a rather lengthy narrative.393 Within his narrative, there are two brief direct quotations from Muhammad. In one of them Muhammad says: “If she [Hagar] had left the water, it would have been flowing on the surface of the earth.” In the second quotation, Muhammad says: “Because of Abraham’s invocation there are blessings (in

Mecca).” Thus, Ibn ʿAbbās appears to have narrated the story of Abraham by interviewing sayings from Muhammad into his external knowledge of the narrative. The third mode of biblical storytelling is that exegetes (or collectors of their reports) attributed the stories to

Muhammad. We mentioned above two reports, by Abū Hurayra and Ibn ʿAbbās, who ostensibly narrated biblical and hagiographical stories on the authority of Muhammad, namely, the Judgement of Solomon and the Companions of the Cave. Muhammad highly likely knew and narrated these extra-qur’ānic stories to his audiences. But it is possible that some of such reports are later attributions to Muhammad, which indicates that Muslims in later generations, by using Muhammad’s public speech as a reservoir of traditions, created a semiotic space to preserve such stories in Islamic literature.

Misattribution was a wide-spread phenomenon, which was not restricted to

Muhammad, of course. Suleiman Mourad’s work on Ḥasan al-Baṣrī throws great light on the issue of authorship. Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, a renowned Successor and the founder of Islamic mysticism according to the tradition, was remembered among the storytellers together with his mother. 394 As Mourad extensively demonstrates, Ḥasan’s image as a narrator of exhortative stories and logia from Muhammad as well as from pre-Islamic prophets was

393 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, §584. 394 Swartz, Kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ, 103, 125, 134, 151; H. Ritter, “Ḥasan al-Baṣrī,” in EI2; Suleiman Mourad, “al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī,” in EI3. For Umm al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, see Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt, 10:442; Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb, 4:672; Armstrong, Quṣṣāṣ, 295; Mourad, Early Islam, 19-25. For Ḥasan as a ḥadīth transmitter, and narrator of biblical stories, see ibid., 47-51, 59-98.

119 developed in many competing Islamic theological and philosophical circles.395 Some of these reports were misattributed to Ḥasan, based on the fact that the style of his preaching matched with the content of the report;396 some were misattributed because of a confusion in names and cognomens;397 yet other reports reveal false attributions of other people’s narrations to Ḥasan and vice versa. 398 Thus, Ḥasan’s dossier display many intricate mechanisms that complicate traditions and their transmission processes. Despite these complications, the reports emphasize the Islamic tradition’s continuous transmission of and conversation with the broader biblical-hagiographical knowledge after Muhammad.

The other form of transmission from the biblical-hagiographical milieu was the transmission of tropes, and description and narration of Muhammad based on these tropes.

As biblical stories were interwoven into the exegetical tradition of the Qur’ān,

Muhammad’s life was integrated into the broader biblical milieu as a member, a participant of that milieu. For example, many early exegetes and transmitters narrated the story of

Muhammad receiving inspiration from Satan and mistaking it for divine speech, the well- known incident of the satanic verses.399 As Uri Rubin and Shahab Ahmed point out, the narration of this story indicates the early Islamic community’s participation in the broader scriptural universe through their representation of Muhammad with familiar hagiographical tropes, such as satanic temptation, fallibility of prophets and holy men,

395 Ibid., passim. 396 Ibid., 73-76. 397 Ibid., 76-78. 398 Ibid., 79-91. 399 For an analysis of the 50 reports narrating the indicent, see Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 41-264.

120 correction of mistakes, and repentance.400 Similarly, in the Sīra, Ibn Isḥāq gives many reports about the early signs of Muhammad’s prophethood, narrated within hagiographical frames known from the broader literary and oral milieu, such as his miraculous conception, birth and childhood, intermittent seclusion and prayer in a cave away from everyday society. 401 The reports Ibn Isḥāq collected, despite the possibility of later editorial processes, testify to early transmitters’ narrations being informed by hagiographical tropes, terms, and expressions from the late antique eastern Mediterranean milieu of piety and asceticism.402 Muhammad’s image as a late antique holy man403 in the memory of Muslims was only more reinforced when he was depicted as narrating and interpreting biblical stories in reports like the ones mentioned above.

As Sahair El Calamawy argues, although storytellers in the early Islamic period were somewhat hampered by the currently forming rules of orthodoxy in their narrations about Muhammad and the early Islamic community, they navigated the realm of storytelling by creating multifaceted, vivid images of Muhammad.404 Of course, we only have access to a deliberately shaped memory of the immensely multivocal, fluid, versatile, and constant intercultural transmissions that took place in this era, and the extant literary

400 Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 3-4, 162; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 272. Note that in some reports of the satanic verses indicent, God reproaches Muhammad for saying to people what He did not say to him. For example, see ibid., 50. This reproach and reprimand reminds one of the qur’ānic verse 5:116 where God asks Jesus whether he told to people “Take me and my mother as gods to the exclusion of God.” This similarity indicates that the qur’ānic discourse likely was integrated into broader storytelling conventions in the early Middle Ages. 401 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 69-73, 105. 402 For a brief overview of Ibn Isḥāq’s sources for the Sīra, see Watt, “Materials used by Ibn Isḥāq,” 23-34. 403 Pointed out by Peter Brown, in Brown, Society and the Holy, 103-4, 148ff. 404 Sahari El Calamawy, “Narrative elements in the ḥadīth literature,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. Beeston et al., 308-16.

121 corpus is problematic in many aspects. Firstly, we have very limited information about transmissions that did not comment on Muhammad’s prophetic life, or hermeneutics of the

Qur’ān. Early community’s curiosities and narrations about non-qur’ānic biblical stories are mostly lost to us. And the memories of Muhammad’s everyday life and pietistic practices are mostly preserved in the highly structured ḥadīth corpus, as brief, legal, prescriptive reports.405

The notion of authorship is also significantly complicated for the early Islamic literature and orature, which obscures the agencies of transmission. The categories of transmitters in the early Islamic community, namely, monotheist ascetics, converts, and

Companions and Successors, recent scholarship emphasizes, are literary constructs organizing the memory and knowledge about the transmission of Jewish and Christian material into Islam. As Michael Pregill extensively demonstrates, early converts and transmitters such as Kaʿb al-Aḥbār became epitomes of trustworthy, sometimes semi- saintly transmitters of traditions known for their vast knowledge of the scriptures.406 The literary practice that singled out certain figures as the transmitters, Pregill argues, overshadowed the many other agents and contexts of transmission of cultural items across confessional boundaries in the early Islamic era. Although it was an immensely multivocal era with porous cultural boundaries, Islamic tradition created a memory of a number of transmitters who facilitated cultural transmission between other monotheist religions and

Islam.

405 Robson, “Ḥadīth,” EI2. 406 Michael Pregill, “Isrā’īliyyāt, myth and pseudoepigraphy: Wahb b. Munabbih and the early Islamic versions of the fall of Adam and Eve,” JSAI 34 (2008): 215-284.

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The challenges notwithstanding, the material we have, namely, the Qur’ān, tafsīr, sīra, and ḥadīth, among other literature, is explicit in that storytelling, already a pre-Islamic practice, was an important tool used by Muhammad and his community in shaping, communicating, and elaborating Islamic history, doctrines, norms, and practices. Many

Companions and Successors transmitted and narrated biblical-hagiographical stories to understand, interpret, and contextualize the Qur’ān, as well as for other purposes, which are obscured in the extant sources. Some of the reports with Jewish and Christian content were approached with skepticism in the later tradition. Still, the Islamic literature still bears witness to numerous Muslims functioning as storytellers in the early Islamic community, playing active role in the transmission and hermeneutics of the Qur’ān, and as participants of the broader biblical-hagiographical milieu of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Chapter 2, to which I now proceed, analyzes a qur’ānic sūra as an inquiry into this dynamism.

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CHAPTER 2: CHRISTIAN HAGIOGRAPHY AND HERMENEUTICS OF THE QUR’ĀN: THE CASE OF SŪRAT AL-KAHF (THE CAVE, Q18:1-110) 407

The earliest attestation of transmission of Christian hagiographical knowledge to Islam is the Qur’ān itself.408 Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation and other public speech at times echoed biblical and extra-biblical stories known from the late antique Christian lore.409 As early as Muhammad’s lifetime, these stories were contextualized, discussed, and contested against the backdrop of the biblical-hagiographical realm by his audiences. This contextualization continued after the codification of the Qur’ān, numerous Companions,

Successors, and scholars of the Qur’ān in the following generations consulting Christian

(and Jewish) traditions in order to situate and interpret certain parts of the qur’ānic discourse. 410 This chapter analyzes the conversation between the Christian biblical- hagiographical realm and sūrat al-kahf (Q18) and its tafsīr.

Sūrat al-kahf is composed of 110 verses, some forming brief narratives, some addressing Muhammad, and others seemingly exhorting and admonishing the audience.

Like the majority of the qur’ānic sūras in which narrative discourse is prominent, the sūra

407 I am very grateful to Sidney Griffith for extensively discussing sūrat al-kahf with me, for giving invaluable suggestions on this chapter, and for generously sharing his unpublished work. 408 Whether or not we identify Muhammad as a Muslim, the memory of his public addresses constituted the fundamental tenets of Islamic doctrines, to be gradually formed in the centuries to follow. 409 With the “biblical and extra-biblical” I do not connote a distinction between canonical vs. apocryphal/pseudepigraphical. I rather refer to biblical (canonical and not) writings and orature, and traditions that do not directly connect to the biblical narrative, such as saints’ lives. 410 This is not limited to qur’ānic exegesis. Christian hagiography is attested also in other Islamic literature as I will demonstrate in the next chapter.

124 does not form a unified, clear narrative; it rather has multiple narrative units, the separation of which has been discussed.411 Marianna Klar’s recent article extensively analyzes the textual composition of sūrat al-kahf. Based on the linguistic formulae employed in the sūra, Klar proposes that the sūra consists of three major narrative units, within which there are multiple sub-units of introductions, conclusions, and examples.412 Although her review and analysis are immensely useful, such textual critique of the sūra undermines the oral- narrative, storytelling character of its recitation by Muhammad. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, sūras preserve a certain degree of orality, and treating them as premeditated textual compositions, especially in light of modern concepts such as

“paragraphs,” diminish our understanding of the early Islamic community’s perception of and engagement with the qur’ānic discourse.413 Moreover, Klar does not consider the broader biblical-hagiographical traditions, which is essential for determining the narratives involved in the sūra. Rabia Bajwa, in her dissertation, analyzes the sūra as composed of five narratives: The Young Men and the Cave, the Master of the Garden, Iblīs the Rebel, the Journey of Moses, and Dhū al-Qarnayn.414 Her analysis relies heavily on structural

411 See the detailed review in Marianna Klar, “Re-examining textual boundaries: Towards a form- critical sūrat al-kahf,” in Islamic Studies Today: Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin, eds. Majid Daneshgar and Walid A. Saleh (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017), 215-238, esp. 216-222. On the narratives in sūrat al-kahf also see Paret, “Qur’ān – I,” 209-210; Hannelis Koloska, Offenbarung, Ästhetik und Korenexegese: Zwei Studien zu Sure 18 (al-Kahf) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), 21-51; George Archer, A Place Between Two Places: The Qur’ānic Barzakh (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017), 107-192; Sidney Griffith, “The narratives of ‘the Companions of the Cave’ and Dhūl-Qarnayn in Sūrat al-Kahf,” (forthcoming). 412 Summarized in the table in Klar, “Re-examining,” 236-7. 413 For “paragraph” as a necessary item to think about the Qur’ān’s composition, see Neal Robinson, “Hands outstretched. Towards a re-reading of Sūrat al-Mā’ida,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 3 (2001): 1-19. 414 Rabia Bajwa, “Divine story-telling as self-presentation. An analysis of sūrat al-kahf,” PhD diss. (Georgetown University, 2012).

125 narratology (as she lengthily defends in the two introductory chapters), and minimally comments on the narratives’ relations to the broader Jewish and Christian traditions.

What is more important and interesting than the exact separation of narrative units is the conversations the sūra (both in Muhammad’s public proclamation, and in the community’s hermeneutical endeavors in later generations) appears to be having with broader literary traditions in late antiquity. I would like to contribute to this inquiry in the current chapter. I will focus on four narratives: The Companions of the Cave (Q18:9-26), the Rich Man and the Poor Man (Q18:32-44), Moses and the Servant of God (Q18:60-82), and the Two-horned (Q18:83-100). The textual boundaries of these narratives have been a matter of debate. They are, nevertheless, all clearly identifiable in narratological terms as distinct narrative units, with unfolding of a sequence of events and a certain degree of character development. 415 Each of these narratives resonate with certain biblical- hagiographical traditions in late antiquity. Therefore, situating them within the context of

Muhammad’s prophetic career greatly enhances our understanding of narrative transmission in early Islam. The exegetical tradition adds another semiotic layer to these narratives, and in the second half of this chapter I will demonstrate Muslim scholars’ hermeneutical engagements with the qur’ānic verses through their knowledge of the

Christian tradition, which throws invaluable light on transmission, circulation, and uses of

Christian hagiography in the Middle Ages across confessional boundaries.

415 Klar, “Re-examining,” 220. Bajwa applies a more structural narratological definition for qur’ānic narratives. Bajwa, “Divine story-telling,” 31-68. Yet, the oral-discursive nature of the qur’ānic storytelling, and its specific sitz im leben in which Muhammad addresses multiple audiences over a long period of time, render such structural approaches somewhat superfluous.

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2.1. Exegesis and storytelling

It has been generally agreed in modern scholarship that in its earliest stage qur’ānic tafsīr developed as a mixture of two strands of hermeneutical practice: 1) the transmission and expansion of Muhammad’s (if available), 416 his Companions’, and the Successors’ commentaries on the Qur’ān, and 2) the narrative, haggadic practice of using stories or anecdotes to provide a narrative framework for commentary on qur’ānic passages.417 In both of these approaches the exegete provides a framing story for the qur’ānic verse or the passage. Gabriel Reynolds makes a distinction between the practice of creating a narrative around qur’ānic verses in a manner of storytelling and the practice of referring to Judeo-

Christian material to elucidate qur’ānic verses and the stories these verses allude to.418

According to his framework, when an exegete completes a qur’ānic narrative by providing details to make the Qur’ān more approachable and understandable to its audiences, this practice qualifies as storytelling.419 The details the exegete provides in these cases might explain the passage, or merely improve the narrative. Reynolds states that referring to

Judeo-Christian material was a different exegetical device.420 Walid Saleh calls these

416 There are very limited number of ḥadīth reports in which Muhammad expands on verses from the Qur’ān. For example, Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih, 120-121 (§25, §27), 130 (§64), 142 (§120). 417 For haggadic exegesis, see Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 122-3. The other types Wansbrough suggests are, in chronological order, halakhic, masoretic, rhetorical, and allegorical, in ibid., 119; Andrew Rippin, “Studying early tafsīr texts,” in The Qur’ān and Its Interpretative Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 311-16; Claude Gilliot, “Exegesis of the Qur’ān. Classical and medieval,” in Tafsīr: Interpreting the Quran, ed. Mustafa Shah, 1:164-6; idem., “The beginnings of Quranic exegesis,” in Tafsīr, ed. Shah, 1:336-7. For a useful theorization of narrative exegesis in the Jewish context, see David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 418 Reynolds, Qur’ān in its Biblical Subtext, 200-19. 419 Ibid., 201-6. 420 Ibid., 217-18.

127 exegetical narratives as “fictive narrative,” and argues that if the exegete creates a narrative

“in the absence of any support in the verse for the narrative interpretation,” it constitutes a fictive narrative.421 Thus, Saleh says, “an interpretation with a narrative component about

Moses offered for a verse that has a direct or even fleeting reference to Moses story is not a fictive narrative interpretation.”422

The distinction that is raised in scholarship, namely, the one between the “fictive narrative/storytelling” and the exegetical narrative based on a previous narrative, is problematic, since in both of these exegetical compositions, a historical moment that the

Qur’ān refers to is recalled, be it of Moses, or of unnamed characters. Therefore, in terms of historical contextualization, both of these types of exegesis do the same thing, namely, creating a historical context. The distinction also undermines scholars’ and storytellers’ connection to and knowledge of Jewish and Christian texts and oral traditions. Even when an exegete provided a random detail, like the name of a character or a place, a number denoting distance or duration, he was often informed by broader Jewish or Christian traditions, and thus connected Islamic narratives to those traditions.423 The practice of storytelling does not happen in a vacuum, in isolation of the literary and oral traditions of the storyteller’s social context. Therefore, I find it useful to approach narrative-haggadic exegesis of the Qur’ān as a more inclusive hermeneutical practice, one of the major sources of which was Jewish and Christian material.

421 Walid Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qur’ān Commentary of al- Thaʿlabī (d.427/1035) (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 161-6. 422 Ibid., 161. 423 Robinson, “History and heilsgeschichte,” 141-4.

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Exegetes of the Qur’ān often provided stories of pre-Islamic prophets and saints to contextualize and elucidate the personae or events that are alluded to in qur’ānic pericopes.424 As Shahab Ahmed states, tafsīr, especially in its early phase, was aimed at building broad horizons for hermeneutical possibilities for the qur’ānic verses, which required for these works and narrations to be often uncertain and exploratory in nature.425

Thus, the early Muslim exegetes collected many narratives informed by Christian biblical and hagiographical traditions, which was the more prominent exegetical method especially until the introduction of grammatical analysis to Qur’ān exegesis roughly in the late eighth century.426 Islamic tradition later on reorganized this corpus of transmitted material, which led to the foundation of two particular genres in Islamic literature, namely, isrā’īliyyāt

(narratives of cosmogony and biblical prophets from the Jewish and Christian traditions) and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā (stories of prophets and saints), and it is useful to give a brief overview of them.

The use of isrā’īliyyāt material has been continuous in qur’ānic hermeneutics, although the discourse on the term, as Tottoli demonstrates, went through multiple phases

424 A. Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2; Fred Leemhuis, “Origins and early development of the tafsīr tradition,” in Tafsīr, ed. Shah, 1: 201; Gilliot, “Exegesis of the Quran,” 168-9; Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 45; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 97-109; Reynolds, Qur’ān in its Biblical Subtext, 217; Pregill, “Isrā’īliyyāt, myth and pseudoepigraphy,” 229-30; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 280-1. Note that parable (mashal) [Stern’s transliteration of the Hebrew word] was an important tool for hermeneutics of Midrash in the Rabbinic Jewish tradition. Yet, none of the uses of the parable (as an illustration, secret speech or rhetorical narrative) is an accurate counterpart of haggadic exegesis of the Qur’ān. In all of the uses of parable that Stern analyzes, the exegete points out the similarities between the parable and the biblical narrative. But narratives, in this exegetical practice, are not used to fill in the gaps of information. Stern, Midrash and Theory, 39-50. 425 Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 31, 277. 426 Claude Gilliot, “A schoolmaster, storyteller, exegete and warrior at work in Khurāsān: al- Ḍaḥḥāk b. Muzāḥim al-Hilālī (d. 106/724),” in Aims, Methods and Contexts of Qur’ānic Exegesis, ed. Karen Bauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 312-3; idem, “Christians and Christianity in Islamic exegesis”, in Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, ed. David Thomas (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 1:31-56; Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 45-49.

129 of change. 427 Early on in Islamic historiography the term was used either to refer to a genre or the title of a specific book that included narratives about cosmogony and biblical history.

Eventually the term came to be used partly pejoratively, to refer to material that was originally Jewish and therefore ostensibly unreliable.428 As a result, transmitters known to have collected and used these texts, such as the aforementioned Kaʿb al-Aḥbār (seventh c.), and in the following generations Wahb b. Munabbih (d. 738),429 Muqātil b. Sulaymān

(d. 767)430 and others, were also criticized by some later historians, who often conflated transmission of isrā’īliyyāt with storytelling, and deemed these works unreliable collections of absurd, prodigious stories. 431 The criticism of using isrā’īliyyāt is first attested in the tenth century.432 The use of isrā’īliyyāt and other Jewish and Christian

427 Roberto Tottoli, “Origin and use of the term isrā’iliyyāt in Muslim literature,” Arabica 46, no. 2 (1999): 193-210. 428 Tottoli “Origin and use of the term isrā’īliyyāt,” 203-4. 429 Raif Georges Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih,” in EI2; idem., Wahb B. Munabbih, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1972); Tilman Nagel, Alexander der Grosse in der frühislamischen Volksliteratur (Hessen: Verlag für Orientkunde H. Vorndarn, 1978); Pregill, “Isrā’īliyyāt, myth and pseudoepigraphy;” Abd al-Aziz Duri, “The beginnings of historical folklore: Wahb ibn Munabbih,” in The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, ed. and trans. Lawrance Conrad (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 122-35. 430 M. Plessner and A. Rippin, “Muḳātil b. Sulaymān,” in EI2; Dodge, Fihrist, 1: 444-45; Isaiah Goldfeld, “Muqātil b. Sulaymān,” in Arabic and Islamic Studies, ed. J. Mansour (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1978), 2:13-30; Haggai Mazuz, “Possible midrashic sources in Muqātil b. Sulaymān’s Tafsīr,” JSS 61, no. 2 (2016): 497-505 431 Tottoli “Origin and use of the term isrā’īliyyāt,” 199-200; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 7; Goldfeld, “Muqātil b. Sulaymān,” 13-30; Mazuz, “Possible midrashic sources,” 497-505; Tottoli calls Muqātil’s exegesis as primitive exegesis, not paying attention to theological concepts or chains of transmission, but only to filling the details in stories. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets 98. 432 The historian al-Masʿūdī (tenth c.) first uses the term isrā’īliyyāt, and warns against its non- scholarly nature for historiography. He still uses isrā’īliyyāt material, for Wahb b. Munabbih’s writings are among the sources of al-Masʿūdī’s world history Murūj al-ḍahab for biblical history and stories of prophets. Tottoli “Origin and use of the term isrā’īliyyāt,” 194-5. For a translation of al-Masʿūdī’s work, see Aloys Sprenger, trans., Al-Masʿūdī’s Historical Encyclopaedia Entitled “Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems” (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1841). Wahb’s isrā’īliyyāt was also cited as one of the sources for the biblical past in Ibn Murajja’s (eleventh c.) Faḍā’il of Jerusalem [Excellences of Jerusalem]. Tottoli “Origin and use of the term isrā’īliyyāt,” 195-6. Also see Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Assessing the isrā’īliyyāt:

130 material were often discursively rejected with the argument that this practice did not fit the scholarly standards of qur’ānic exegesis. Yet, this was a later, scholarly assessment, creating epitomes of what might simply phrased as “good” and “bad” qur’ānic scholarship.

In practice, the isrā’īliyyāt material continued to be used in many genres of Islamic literature. In this process of reorganizing the past scholarship, while some scholars were deemed untrustworthy, others were accepted as trustworthy interpreters of the Qur’ān, although they, too, used Jewish and Christian traditions. For example, Ibn ʿAbbās, “the father of tafsīr,” is known to have relied on isrā’īliyyāt.433 The Tafsīr attributed to him, edited by Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 1414), is replete with hagiographical narratives.434

The qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā literature had a related yet different development. Stories of biblical prophets as well as extra-biblical Jewish and Christian saints and heroes were known in pre-Islamic Arabia, particularly in contexts of poetry and storytelling. 435

Muhammad’s life constituted an example of these stories, as the last prophet in the

An exegetical conundrum,” in Story-telling in the Framework of Non-fictional Arabic Literature, ed. Leder, 345-49. Ismail Albayrak argues that the first exegete to refrain from and pay critical attention to isrā’īliyyāt material was Ibn ʿAṭiyya (eleventh c.). Albayrak, “Isrā’iliyyāt and classical exegetes’ comments on the calf with a hollow sound Q.20: 83-98 / 7:147-155, with special reference to Ibn ʿAṭiyya,” JSS 47, no. 1 (2002): 39-65. 433 Vaglieri, “ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās,” in EI2; Ignác Goldziher, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1970), 65-69; Tottoli, “Origin and use of the term isrā’iliyyāt,” 204; Herbert Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās in Abbasid-era Tafsīr,” in Tafsīr, ed. Shah, 1:493- 508. 434 Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī, Tanwīr al-miqbās min tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al- kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1980). On the dating and authorship of this work, see Andrew Rippin, “Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās and criteria for dating early tafsīr texts,” JSAI 19 (1994): 38-83; Michael Pregill, “Methodologies for dating of exegetical works and traditions: Can the lost Tafsīr of al-Kalbī be recovered from Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās (also known as al-Wāḍiḥ)?” in Aims, Methods and Contexts of Qur’anic Exegesis (2nd/8th – 9th/15th c.), ed. Karen Bauer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 393-454. 435 T. Nagel, “Ḳiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ,” in EI2.

131 genealogy of biblical prophets of the Old and the New Testaments, which the Qur’ān frequently alludes to. 436 This popular corpus of stories of ancient prophets, closely connected to the hermeneutics of the Qur’ān, was collected under the specific name of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā. One of the earliest examples of this literature comes from the eleventh century, namely, al-Thaʿlabī’s (d. 1035) Arā’is al-majālis fī-qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā.437 Although al-Thaʿlabī had a separate work for qur’ānic exegesis, entitled al-Kashf wal-bayān ʿan tafsīr al-Qur’ān, his Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā is also highly exegetical in character, with quotes from the Qur’ān and reports from the tafsīr tradition.438 Thus, as observed in the qiṣaṣ al- anbiyā and isrā’īliyyāt literatures, stories of prophets and sages was an integral part of qur’ānic hermeneutics both within and out of the tafsīr proper.

The development of qur’ānic exegetical tradition alongside the trajectories of isrā’īliyyāt and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā literatures shows Jewish and Christian hagiographical material’s significance for the Muslim exegete, beyond the confines of generic categorizations and conventions. After the earliest generation of Qur’ān scholars, stories, categorized under different genres, such as sīra (generally accepted as prophetic biography) and asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions of revelation), continued to be used for qur’ānic hermeneutics as long as the narratives were in accord with the contemporary Islamic-

436 Jeffery, Qur’ān as Scripture, 36ff; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran, 89-91; Zwettler, “A mantic manifesto,” 96-115; Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 56-80; Neuwirth, Scripture, 292, 394-5; idem, “Locating the Qur’an,” 165-185; idem, “Qur’ānic studies and philology,” 191ff; Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 25-26. See my discussion on Muhammad’s mythopoiesis in Chapter 1. 437 William M. Brinner, ed. and trans., Arāʻis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā or “Lives of the Prophets”: As Recounted by Abu Ishaq Ahmad Ibn Muhammed Ibn Ibrahim al-Thalabi (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2002). 438 For example, see the story of Abraham in ibid., 128ff.

132 qur’ānic teachings. 439 Claude Gilliot demonstrates the ways in which Christians and

Christianity is represented in Islamic exegesis in his bibliographical essay, giving an overview of the stories and other literary tools exegetes of the Qur’ān used in order to define, confine, and frame Christians in exegesis.440 His analysis, being restricted to the representations of Jesus, Mary, and other major biblical figures, paves the way for analyses of other Islamic exegetical depictions of Christians.

I demonstrate this with a focus on the four aforementioned qur’ānic narratives in sūrat al-kahf, which reveal close familiarity of the Qur’ān with the Christian biblical, homiletic, and hagiographical lore. There is voluminous and excellent scholarship on these qur’ānic passages. My presentation will bring together this corpus of scholarship, with the addition of some significant primary sources into the conversation, for a holistic understanding and analysis of the sūra. These four narratives should be treated together, since at least in the early Muslim imagination these narratives formed a semiotic unity, hence the formation of the sūrat al-kahf. In the codification process of the Qur’ān, these narratives were remembered to have been recited together, and any scholarly analysis of them should take this historical moment into consideration.441

The narratives in sūrat al-kahf were later interpreted through extra-Islamic material for exegetical purposes. I analyze the hermeneutical traditions of these passages, with a

439 McAuliffe, “Assessing the isrā’īliyyāt,” 349-361. For examples of such uses in al-Ṭabarī’s historiography, see Michael Whitby, “Al-Ṭabarī: The period before Jesus,” in Al-Ṭabarī: A Medieval Muslim Historian and His Work, ed. Hugh Kennedy (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2008), 13, 16, 17. 440 Gilliot, “Christians and Christianity in Islamic exegesis.” 441 Mustansir Mir argues that treating the sūra as a unity is a modern exegetical practice, but as he also briefly mentions, this was debated in Qur’ān scholarship in the Middle Ages. Mustansir Mir, “The sūra as a unity: A twentieth century development in Qur’ān exegesis,” in Approaches to the Qur’ān, eds. Hawting and Shareef, 211-224.

133 focus on Muslim scholars’ engagement with Christian biblical-hagiographical material in their tafsīr works. For this, I will mostly focus on the Tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī, the voluminous tenth-century compendium of traditions and analyses epitomizing the classical expression of qur’ānic tafsīr.442 I will also include other early works, such as the Tafsīr of Muqātil b.

Sulaymān (d. 767),443 an early traditionist who heavily relied on information from the

“People of the Book,” and whose work is not included in al-Ṭabarī’s compilation;444 and the Tafsīr of al-Qummī,445 a tenth-century shīʿī exegesis;446 and occasionally the works that comment on qur’ānic events and persons, although in terms of genre are not categorized as tafsīrs, such as the Sīra, and Islamic historiography.

2.2. Sūrat al-kahf (Q18)

Sūrat al-kahf opens with these verses:

Praise belongs to God, who has sent down the scripture to his servant and has not set in it any crookedness – straight, to give warning of a stern might from Him, and to bring good tidings to the believers who do righteous deeds that they will have a fair reward, in which they will stay forever; and to warn those who say, “God has taken to Himself a son.” They have no knowledge of it, nor did their forefathers. It is a monstrous word that comes from their mouths. They speak nothing but a lie. (Q18:1-5)

442 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī: al-Musamma jāmiʿ ʿal-bayān fī- ta’wīl al-Qur’ān (Beirut: Dār al- kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999); Rippin, “Tafsīr,” EI2; Claude Gilliot, Exégèse, Langue et Théologie en Islam: L'exégèse coranique de Ṭabarī (m.311/923) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1990); idem., “Mythe, récit, histoire du salut dans la commentaire du Coran de Tabari,” Journal Asiatique 282 (1994): 237- 79; Tarif Khalidi, “Al-Ṭabarī: An introduction,” in Al-Ṭabarī, ed. Kennedy, 1-10. 443 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr Muqātil b. Sulaymān (Al-hay’at al-miṣriyya al-ʿāmmat lil-kitāb, 1983), 2: 559-607. 444 Plessner and Rippin, “Muḳātil b. Sulaymān,” EI2. 445 ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī, Tafsīr al-Qummī (Dār al-kitāb lil-ṭabāʿa wal-nashr, 1983), 2:30-47. 446 Rippin, “Tafsīr,” EI2.

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After this dramatic, arguably anti-Christian opening,447 the sūra addresses Muhammad, and informs him and the audience that God tests people to identify those who believe:

If they do not believe in this discourse, perhaps you will exhaust yourself with grief, following them up. We have made all that is on the earth an ornament for it, to test which of them is best in deed. And we shall make what is on it barren dust. (Q18:6-8)

Immediately after the verses in which God says He tests people to see those best in deed, the sūra narrates the story of the Companions of the Cave (aṣḥāb al-kahf) (Q18:9-

26), with thematic emphases on God’s oneness, his testing of people’s belief and knowledge, and the punishment of those who take deities beside him, which is in direct continuation with the opening discourse of the sūra. The following five verses (Q18:27-

31) describe the punishment of the deniers and reward of the believers. With verse 32, the sūra begins another narrative, the parable of two men (mathalan rajulayni) (Q18:32-44), the overarching theme of which is again God’s omnipotence and oneness. Then, in another mathal, the life of this world is compared to fleeting rain, and the Day of Judgment is described (Q18:45-49). After this comes a mention of Iblīs’ turning away from God, and the Qur’ān admonishes against taking him and his descendants (dhurriyyatahu) as allies to

God. In verses 51 through 59 the Qur’ān reminds the audience of messengers, books, and guidance sent to peoples, and of God’s punishment upon their denial. After the end of the parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man in verse 44, the next identifiable narrative begins

447 The phrase “Allah taking a son” might refer to the Christian Trinity, as well as the polytheist belief that deities had children. Therefore, it is not necessarily an anti-Christian rhetoric. Nevertheless, considering the Christian communities around Mecca in late antiquity, it is presumable that Muhammad’s proclamations had anti-Christian polemical discourse. Griffith, “Christian lore,” 117-8.

135 with verse 60, the story of an unnamed servant of God who instructs Moses (Q18:60-82), immediately after which comes that of the Two-horned (Dhū al-Qarnayn) (Q18:83-100).

Nöldeke expressed uncertainty about whether the latter two narratives originated at the same time as the rest of the sūra.448 Despite the formal inconsistencies, thematically all of these narratives fit the themes of the sūra. The closing ten verses (Q18:101-110), which are believed to address Muhammad, return to the recurring theme of the punishment awaiting for those who ridicule God’s prophet and message, and those who take allies and equals with Him. 449 The four narratives that support the themes are allusive and fragmentary. They “belong to the timeless storehouse of contemporary world literature,” in Nöldeke’s words, 450 and they echo biblical and hagiographical stories known particularly from the late antique Christian hagiography and homiletics.

The exegetes interpreting these pericopes appear to have realized these close resonances and turned to the Christian tradition for hermeneutics of the stories in sūrat al- kahf. Surely, the Qur’ān is a discourse in itself, reshaping and reorienting what appears to be “Christianisms/biblicisms” embedded within its structure. Nevertheless, the exegetes’ attempt to understand the qur’ānic narratives in light of Christian orature and literature realigns the Qur’ān with the broader scriptural traditions of late antiquity. We will revisit the exegetical tradition for each one of these narratives below. Let us first have a brief overview of the early Islamic memory regarding the revelation of verses of this sūra.

448 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 114-5. 449 Bruce Fudge, “The Men of the Cave: Tafsīr, tragedy and Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm,” Arabica 54, no. 1 (2007): 73-4. 450 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 116.

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The Islamic tradition situates the revelation of sūrat al-kahf in Mecca, providing various details about the occasion.451 Ibn Isḥāq in the Sīra reports that this sūra was revealed when Qurashī opponents of Muhammad wanted to test the authenticity of his prophethood while he was still in Mecca.452 According to the reports, they consulted with

Jewish rabbis in Medina, who advised them to ask Muhammad the stories of “the Youths, the Mighty Traveler, and the Spirit.” 453 After fifteen days of suspension of divine revelation, Muhammad recited sūrat al-kahf. Muqātil also places the revelation of the sūra in Mecca, where, he reports, Abū Jahl, one of Muhammad’s prominent pagan opponents, consulted with Jews on the prophethood of Muhammad; and they advised Abū Jahl to ask him about the Companions of the Cave, Dhū al-Qarnayn, and the Spirit.454 Al-Qummī reports that three pagan Meccans went to Najrān, a city in south Arabia well known for its

Jewish and Christian communities in late antiquity, to consult the Jews and Christians there on how to interrogate Muhammad; they told the Meccans to ask him about the Youths,

Moses and his servant, and Dhū al-Qarnayn, as well as the Hour.455 Al-Qummī also notes that the phrase “Allah taking a son” at the beginning of the sūra was referring to the

Quraysh’s belief that angels were daughters of God, Jews’ belief that Ezra was the son of

451 Some verses of it are argued to be Medinan. Ibid., 114-6. 452 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 133-141, possibly in light of the qur’ānic discourse, especially the phrase “and they ask you,” later in the sūra in Q18:80. It is also in Maʿmar b. Rāshīd’s Maghāzī. Anthony, Expeditions, 167-172. The narrative is between the story of the People of the Pit and the construction of the temple in Jerusalem by Solomon. Other exegetes, such as Muqātil, al-Qummī and Ibn Kathīr, give slightly differing frame stories. In the asbāb al-nuzūl literature, too, there are variants. For a brief overview, see Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 203-4. 453 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 136. Ibn Isḥāq’s account does not explain the narrative of the unnamed servant, it only mentions the Youths and the Mighty Traveler. 454 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 2:575; Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 170. 455 Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 2:31-2; Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 171.

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God, and Christians’ belief that Jesus was the son of God.456 Thus, in many of these early exegetical reports, the sūra is given a polemical frame, as Muhammad’s response to

Qurashī as well as other opponents.

In the eleventh-century Qur’ān scholar al-Wāḥidī’s Asbāb al-nuzūl, 457 the occasions for the revelation of only four verses in this sūra are given.458 These verses and their occasions are: piety of the poor despised by the rich in Muhammad’s community

(Q18:28), Jews questioning Muhammad on his knowledge (Q18:83, 109 – these verses correspond roughly to the beginning and the end of the story of Dhū al-Qarnayn), and believers who enjoy their piety and strive to be visible and exalted for it (Q18:110). Thus, in this work, the sūra as a whole is interpreted for its exhortation on asceticism. Of course, tafsīr and asbāb al-nuzūl works were later interpretations of the Qur’ān, framed and shaped by the social, theological, and literary contexts within which they were written.

Nevertheless, the reports they transmit carry kernels of truth with regard to the possible different receptions of various stories in the Qur’ān in early Islam. We will now turn to these particular four narratives and have a two-fold analysis for each: their iteration in

Muhammad’s qur’ānic proclamation, and their perception and interpretation by the exegetes of the Qur’ān.

456 Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 2:30-31. 457 R. Sellheim, “al-Wāḥidī,” in EI2. He is one of the prominent scholars of the Qur’ān, possibly of Christian pedigree, associated with the asbāb al-nuzūl literature. 458 Mokrane Guezzu, trans., Al-Wāḥidī’s Asbāb al-Nuzūl. Great Commentaries on the Holy Qur’an (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2008), 152-3.

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2.2.a. The Companions of the Cave in Q18:9-26

Or do you think that the companions of the Cave and of the inscription were a wonder among our signs? When the youths betook themselves to the Cave and said, “Our Lord, give us mercy from your presence, and prepare for us a way in our affair.” Then we sealed up their ears in the cave for a number of years. Then we woke them that we might know which of the two parties would calculate better the period they had tarried. We shall tell you their tidings in truth. They were youths who believed in their Lord, and we gave them greater guidance. We braced their hearts when they stood up and said, “Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth. We do not call to any god apart from Him. If we were to do that, we would be speaking an outrage. These people, our people, have taken to themselves gods apart from Him. Why do they not have a clear authority for them? And who does greater wrong than those who invent a lie against God?” When you have withdrawn from them and what they worship to the exclusion of God, take refuge in the Cave. Your Lord will unfold for you some of His mercy and He will prepare for you a cushion in your affair. You could see the sun, when it rose, inclining from their cave to the right; and when it set, going past them on the left, while they were in a cleft in it. That was one of God’s signs. Those whom God guides are rightly guided; and those whom He sends astray you will not find for them a protector who will guide them. You would have thought them awake though they were asleep, and we would turn them over to the right and to the left, with their dogs stretching its paws on the threshold. If you had looked at them closely, you would have turned away from them in flight and would have been filled with awe of them. Thus, we raised them that they might ask questions among themselves. One of them said, “How long have you tarried?” They said, “We have tarried a day or part of a day.” They said, “Your Lord is well aware of how long you have tarried. Send one of you with this silver coin of yours to the city, and let him see which of them has purest food, and let him bring some of it to you as sustenance. Let him be courteous and let him not make anyone aware of you. If they were to become aware of you, they would stone you or turn you back to their creed. Then you will never prosper.” [commentary on the story begins] Likewise we caused [people] to stumble upon them that they might know that the promise of God is true and that there is no doubt about the Hour. When they were arguing among themselves over the affair, they said, “Build a building over them. Their Lord is well aware about them.” Those who prevailed over their affair said, “Let us build a place of prayer over them.” They will say, “Three, and their dog was the fourth of them.” They will say, “Five, and their dog the sixth of them” guessing at the invisible.

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They will say, “Seven, and their dog the eighth of them.” Say, “My Lord is well aware of their number. Only a few know them.” So, dispute concerning them only on a clear issue; and do not ask any of them for an opinion about them. And do not say about anything, “I am going to do that tomorrow,” save the [with the proviso] that God so wills. And mention God when you forget and say, “Perhaps my Lord will guide me to something nearer a correct way than this.” And they tarried in the cave three hundred years and nine more. Say, “God is well aware how long they tarried. To Him belongs the invisible in the heavens and the earth. How well He sees and hears. They have no protector apart from Him, and He has no associates in His rule.”459 (Q18:9-26)

The opening verse reminds the audience (or Muhammad, since in the previous verses it is believed that God addresses Muhammad) of the Companions of the Cave and an inscription as God’s wondrous signs, followed by the story.460 The youths retreated to the cave, where God put them to sleep (while a dog stretched out his legs at the entrance of the cave), and wakened them after “a number of years.” Then, the qur’ānic voice narrates, they discussed what happened to them and how long they had been sleeping, after which one of them went to the city to buy food. With the verse 21, the commentary on the story begins, which Griffith argues was an interpretive rehearsal of the same story.461 In this latter part, the qur’ānic voice mentions different versions of the story, and warns

459 Note that the last two verses appear to contradict each other, one giving exact number of years (Q18:25), and the other contesting it (Q18:26). This might indicate that different narrations of the story are preserved in the Qur’ān. 460 What is translated as “inscription” here, al-raqīm, is in fact much discussed in exegesis and scholarship. It could be the inscription mentioning the names of the Companions of the Cave and/or narrating their story, the village or the valley where the cave was, or the name of the Companions’ leader or the guard. Griffith, “Christian lore,” 125-6; Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 171-6; Mehdy Shaddel, “Studia onomastica coranica: Al-Raqīm, caput nabataeae,” JSS 62, no. 2 (2017): 303-18. 461 Griffith, “Christian lore,” 118.

140 against any unsubstantiated speculation about the details, such as the number of the

Companions and the duration of their sleep.

The qur’ānic Companions of the Cave is clearly an allusion to the Christian legend of the Youths of Ephesus, although the Qur’ān does not explicitly identify them as

Christians or followers of Jesus.462 Emran Elbadawi, following Sidney Griffith, states that this sūra is one of the clear indications of the formation of the Qur’ān with an intimate understanding of the Syriac literature.463 Despite widely circulating in many languages of the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity and beyond, the earliest extant recensions of the

462 The Qur’ān rarely frames proper believers as Christians or Jews, therefore, the representation of the Companions of the Cave as believers rather than Christians is not exceptional or surprising in the qur’ānic context. The fundamental works on this legend are: BHO, 1012-1014; Ignazio Guidi, Testi Orientali Inediti sopra I Sette Dormienti de Efeso (Roma: Tipografia Della R. Accademia Dei Lincei, 1885); Paul Bedjan, ed., AMS 1 (Parisiis, Lipsiae: Harrasssowitz, 1890): 301-325, 528-535; M. Huber, Die Wanderlegende von den Siebenschläfern. Eine literarische Untersuchung (Leipzig: Harassowitz, 1910); Paul Peeters, “Le texte original de la Passion des Sept Dormants,” An. Boll. 41, no. 3&4 (1923): 369-385; H. Leclercq, “Sept dormants d’Éphèse,” DACL 15, no. 1 (1950): 1251-62; Louis Massignon, “Les Sept Dormants, apocalypse de l’Islam,” An. Boll. 68 (1950): 245-60; idem., “Le culte liturgique et populaire des VII dormants martyrs d’Ephése (Ahl al-Kahf). Trait d’union orient-occident entre l’Islam et la Chrétienté, in Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut, 1963), 3:109-80; idem., “Les septs dormants d’Éphèse (ahl al- kahf) en Islam et Chrétienté,” Revue des Études Islamiques 22 (1954): 59-112; E. Honigmann, “Stephen of Ephesus and the Seven Sleepers,” Patristic Studies, ed. idem., Studi e Testi 173 (Rome, 1953), 125-68; Francois Jourdan, La tradition des sept dormants: Une rencontre entre chretiens et musulmans (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001); M. Vogt, “Die Siebenschläfern – Funktion einer Legende,” Hallesche Beiträge zur Orientwissenschaft 38 (2004): 223-247; Paul Bedjan, ed., Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, with additional material by Sebastian Brock (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006) 6:324-330; Sebastian Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s poem on the Sleepers of Ephesus,” in ‘I Sowed Fruits into Hearts’ (Odes Sol. 17:13): Festschrift for Professor Michael Lattke, eds. P. Allen, M. Franzmann, R. Strelan, Early Christian Studies 12 (Strathford: St. Pauls Publications, 2007), 13-30. A useful survey of the trope of miraculous sleepers in Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature is in Pieter W. van der Horst, “Pious long- sleepers in Greek, Jewish and Christian antiquity,” in Tradition, Transmission, and Transformation from Second Temple Literature through Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, eds. Menahem Kister et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 93-111. 463 Griffith “Christian lore,” 109-137; Elbadawi, “Impact of Aramaic on the Qur’ān,” 220, 223; also see Reynolds, Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext, 167-85.

141 story were written in Syriac, circulating strictly in the West Syrian (Jacobite) tradition.464

There are many versions of the story, significantly varying in detail. The following, however, is the most common storyline: There were seven young men,465 who, during the persecution of Decius in mid-third century in Ephesus, refused to renounce their faith in

Christ, and retreated to a cave where they fell asleep. They woke up after a long amount of time, generally attributed to the reign of Theodosius II (r. 408-450), when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. After they woke up, they understood what happened to them only after one of them went to the city to search for food. A church was built upon the cave in which they had fallen asleep.

Griffith extensively demonstrates how particular terminology in the qur’ānic verses, such as the term al-raqīm, and the dog as the guardian of the holy men, are greatly explicable against the context of Syriac literary and cultural milieu in late antiquity.466 His detailed comparison of the qur’ānic narrative with the verse homily (mēmrā) of Jacob of

Sarug467 (d. 521) on the Youths of Ephesus is very illuminating in showing the close parallelisms between the qur’ānic Companions of the Cave and the Syriac tradition of the

Youths of Ephesus, which is not to be reconstructed here.468 What the scholarship has commented upon less than the Qur’ān’s incontestable inclusion of stories that are similar

464 Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s poem on the Sleepers of Ephesus,” 14-15; Sidney Griffith, “Christian lore,” 120-1; Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 68-9. 465 There are different numbers given in the Christian tradition. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s poem on the Sleepers of Ephesus,” 14-15; Griffith, “Christian lore,” 129. 466 Griffith, “Christian lore;” also see some essential additional comments in Reynolds, Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext, 181-5. Shaddel argues that Griffith’s discussion of the term al-raqīm is circular and therefore untenable, in “Al-Raqīm,” 306. 467 Also frequently spelled as Serugh. 468 For an extensive analysis of Jacob of Sarug’s homiletic preaching in the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity, see Forness, Preaching Christology, passim.

142 to some of those in the Syriac tradition is the ways in which it reorients the story. What role did the recitation of this story play in Muhammad’s communication with his audience?

Both the framing comments, and the dialogues within the story, strongly emphasize the punishments awaiting those who attribute allies, equals, and companions to God. For example, in verses 14-15 the Youths say: “Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth. Never will we invoke besides Him any deity. We would have certainly spoken, then, an excessive transgression. These, our people, have taken besides Him deities. Why do they not bring for [worship of] them a clear authority? And who is more unjust than one who invents about Allah a lie?” Thus, the qur’ānic discourse appears to turn a Christian story into a polemical tool against the Christian doctrine of Jesus being the Son of God, especially if considered together with the abovementioned verses in the opening, which warn against those who say Allah has taken a son.469 Moreover, the theme of the seeming death and the subsequent awakening of the bodies of the Youths with the will of God might be read as an anti-Christian discourse, countering the doctrine of Jesus’s death and resurrection. 470 Reynolds notes that these qur’ānic passages thematically follow the broader qur’ānic discourse on resurrection after death. But, in this particular narrative, the

Youths “appear” as dead, while they are only asleep. Thus, it could be seen as contradicting

469 There are other verses in the Qur’ān that are more explicitly anti-Christian, for example cf. Q4:171: “O People of the Scripture, do not go beyond the bounds in your religion. Do not say anything but the truth about God. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, is truly God’s messenger, and His word, which He cast into Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers and do not say, ‘Three’. Desist – [that is] better for you. God is one God. Glory be to Him – that He should have a son. To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and on earth. God is sufficient trustee.” On this verse, see Clare Elena Wilde, Approaches to the Qur’ān in Early Christian Arabic Texts (750-1258 C.E.) (Bethesda; Dublin; Palo Alto: Academica Press, 2014), 105-53. 470 For a recent treatment of the doctrine of docetism in Christianity, see Joseph Verheyden, et al., eds., Docetism in the Early Church: the Quest for an Elusive Phenomenon (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018).

143 the Christian discourse and doctrine. The verses could also read as anti-pagan, for in pre-

Islamic Arabia deities were believed to have sons, daughters, and siblings. 471 It is unnecessary to single out a community towards which the verses are directed. Suffice it to see the passage as polemical towards multiple communities and doctrinologies present around Muhammad.

The narrative does not only speak to Christians and pagans in Muhammad’s audience. It is also an “edifying” story, in Paret’s words,472 although the latter does not clarify what it edifies the audience on. The story participates in recurrent themes across the rest of the narratives in sūrat al-kahf, which will be apparent as we dwell on each of these narrative units. The repeating themes are God’s omnipotence, wonderous signs of which

He sends; these signs sometimes appear counterintuitive, but belief in God prevails over human senses and futile human knowledge.473 Hence the verses: “If you had looked at them, you would have turned from them in flight and been filled by them with terror. And similarly, We awakened them that they might question one another. Said a speaker from among them, ‘How long have you remained [here]?’ They said, ‘We have remained a day or part of a day.’ They said, ‘Your Lord is most knowing of how long you remained.’”474

In order to develop a better understanding of the exhortative value of this qur’ānic story, we will now turn to the ways in which it was perceived and interpreted by historians and

471 Among the earlier attestations of this pre-Islamic belief is found in Ibn al-Kalbī’s (d. 819) Kitāb al-aṣnām (The Book of Idols). Beyza Düşüngen, trans., Ibn al-Kalbī: Putlar Kitabi (Kitāb al-aṣnām) [Arabic with Turkish translation] (Ankara, 1968), 32, 33; W. Atallah, “al-Kalbī,” in EI2; Dodge, Fihrist, 1: 206-13. 472 R. Paret, “Aṣḥāb al-Kahf,” in EI2; Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 72.; 473 Bruce Fudge summarizes the theme as “the mystery of God’s actions, faith and piety.” Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 73. 474 Q18:18-19.

144 exegetes of the Qur’ān in the Middle Ages, in light of tafsīr, sīra, and asbāb al-nuzūl traditions.

Exegesis of the Companions of the Cave

While determining the circumstances under which sūrat al-kahf was revealed, and how it contributed to the overall narrative of Muhammad’s prophetic career, the exegetes of the

Qur’ān appear to have engaged with Christian hagiographical traditions to fill in the gaps of information in the qur’ānic narrative of the Companions of the Cave. There are multiple strands of exegesis related to this qur’ānic narrative, interpreting it in polemical, admonishing, or exhortative terms. As mentioned above, numerous exegetes situate

Muhammad’s recitation of the story of the Youths in a polemical context, as his response to those who question his prophethood. In some of the reports provided in al-Ṭabarī’s

Tafsīr, the story is interpreted to be reminding of God’s omnipotence, and the veracity of the Hour, two recurring themes throughout this sūra and the Qur’ān in general.475 By some exegetes, it is interpreted as anti-Christian polemic.476 Bruce Fudge, among others, has analyzed the various exegetical traditions related to the verses.477 Fudge gives examples from multiple interpretations, dwelling mostly on the Islamic interpretation of themes and notions raised in this narrative (such as the need to take refuge due to one’s belief, sleep, the type of dog the Youths had, God’s omnipotence, etc.). Yet, he does not analyze Muslim

475 Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 78; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:179-180 (§22775-§22890). 476 For a discussion on the polemical theme of resurrection in this narrative, see ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-Ṣanʿānī, Tafsīr ʿAbd al-Razzāq, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad ʿAbduh (Beirut: Dār al- kutub al-ʿilmiyya, n.d.), 2:323 (§ 1649). 477 Fudge, “Men of the Cave;” Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 170-85.

145 scholars’ access to and engagement with the Christian hagiographical material for the hermeneutics of the narrative.

Exegetes of the Qur’ān often gave details about the story, such as the names of the

Youths, the king who persecuted them, how long they stayed in the cave, etc., although the

Qur’ān itself warns against any search for unsubstantiated details. Fudge argues that the majority of this additional information had little exegetical value, whereas some of them mattered for the formation and solidification of Islamic theological concepts. 478 For instance, although the color of the guarding dog was a trivial information, the fact that it was identified as a hunting dog in the exegetical tradition was important, for dogs in the

Islamic tradition were unclean, except for hunting dogs.479 Regardless of how worthy later exegetes deemed these details to be, however, the fact that these pieces of information were adapted into Islamic literature is important for the analysis of Christian-Islamic literary dialogue. By the latter, I do not imply a direct textual transmission, but simply point to the fact that Christian hagiographical stories, transmitted through oral or textual means, were embedded in Islamic literature. I will give a few examples from the early exegetical traditions of these verses.

In the exegesis attributed to Muqātil b. Sulaymān, he states that two men used to live in the tyrant king Decius’ (Daqyūs al-Jabbār) palace, Mātūs and Asṭūs (Yustus?), hiding their belief.480 They preserved the story of the Youths, by writing it down on “al- raqīm” (generally translated as “inscription”). These two men are not mentioned in the

478 Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 79. Reynolds, following Wansbrough, also argues that the early exegetical traditions of the sūra focused on the story, rather than its theological connotations. Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 204. 479 Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 78-9. 480 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 2:574.

146 qur’ānic verses, and al-raqīm, as mentioned before is an obscure term, not necessarily referring to an inscription. Therefore, Muqātil’s narrative shows the use of Cristian hagiographical knowledge to provide this detail. In Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Youths of Ephesus, for example, these two men are referred to as “two sophists, sons of princess”

(Syr.: ṭrēn sūpsṭē bnay rīshnē), who wrote on tablets the names and the story of the

Youths.481 This detail, as Jacob’s homily shows, was part of the dossier of the Youths of

Ephesus in the Christian tradition, and was transmitted by Muslim storytellers. Plessner and Rippin state that “it is likely that [the Tafsīr] presents versions of the stories told by the early quṣṣāṣ [storytellers].”482 Their argument is based on the fact that Muqātil appears to have given little attention to “issues of text, grammar or the like.”483 This is a great insight towards theorizing what mediated between homilies like that of Jacob and

Muqātil’s account of those narratives, since we likely have a storytellers’ version of the story of the Youths of Ephesus, informed by some knowledge of the Christian homiletic tradition, preserved in Muqātil’s account.

Al-Ṭabarī provides various reports about these verses with further details.484 Some of the reports extensively describe Decius as an idol worshipper, who persecuted

Christians.485 In one report, the names of the Companions of the Cave are given, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās: Maksilmīnā (the oldest), Maḥsīmīlnīnā, Yamlīkhā, Marṭūs,

481 Griffith, “Christian lore,” 123; Jourdan, La tradition des Sept Dormants, 63; Guidi, Sette Dormienti de Efeso, 20. 482 Plessner and Rippin, “Muḳātil b. Sulaymān,” EI2. 483 Ibidem. 484 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:183-212. He also has an account of the story in his History. Brinner, History of al-Ṭabarī, 4:155-59. 485 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:183 (§ 22907)

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Kashūṭūsh, Bīrūnis, Dīnmūs, Yaṭūnis Qālūs.486 There were various traditions with regard to the names of the Youths of Ephesus in late antiquity, and the names given in al-Ṭabarī’s account are similar to the ones given in some of the Christian versions.487 It is difficult, and not necessary, to search for a list of names that is fully matching with the names given in the Islamic tradition. The latter is probably following a certain Syriac recension of the story, since it resonates less with the list of names given in the Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopic traditions.488 As Griffith argues, the Qur’ān’s source for these verses were possibly an oral tradition of the story circulating within the West-Syrian Christian communities around Arabia, likely informed by Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Youths of

Ephesus.489 Similarly, the tafsīr tradition likely inherited these orally circulating stories which filled in the gaps of information in the qur’ānic narrative.

Al-Ṭabarī’s report goes back to Ibn ʿAbbās.490 As Herbert Berg argues, Ibn ʿAbbās quickly became a mythical character to whom many reports of qur’ānic interpretation were attributed.491 Significant portion of them, he argues, showed a consensus of exegetes on an interpretation, and Ibn ʿAbbās merely was used as a symbolic source, rather than a historical authority.492 The names of the Companions of the Cave, listed in this exegetical report, as well as other details of the story, therefore, could be widely circulating

486 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:183 (§22908) 487 Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s poem on the Sleepers of Ephesus,” 16; Peeters, “Passion des Sept Dormants,” 373-4; Huber, Siebenschläfern, 91-96. 488 Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s poem on the Sleepers of Ephesus,” 16. 489 Griffith, “Christian lore,” 121-3. 490 Vaglieri, “ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās,” in EI2. 491 Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās in Abbasid-era Tafsīr,” 493-508. 492 Ibid., 495-6.

148 information attributed to a mythical Ibn ʿAbbās. Alternatively, Ibn ʿAbbās might have had access to Christian sources about this legend, and al-Ṭabarī simply cited the former. Bert argues that by al-Ṭabarī’s time there was no urgency to establish Abbasid legitimacy; therefore, exegetes could challenge the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, and al-Ṭabarī did that when necessary.493 In this case, thus, he might have thought the report was likely sound.

In the Tafsīr attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās, the latter is also remembered to have placed the events during the reign of “Daqyānūs al-Kāfir,” when the Youths refused to worship idols. 494 He identified the Companions’ dog as “Qaṭmīr,” and the oldest one of the

Companions (sayyidhum) as Maksilmīna, who in the story sent one of them, Tamlīkhā

(Yamlīkhā), to the city of Ephesus to buy food. After they wake up, in this Ibn ʿAbbās account, those who see them suggest building a church (kanīsa) above the cave, not a

“structure” (bunyānan) or a prayer house (masjid) as in the Qur’ān. All of these details given in the two reports (in the collection of al-Ṭabarī and in Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās) closely follow the Syriac emplotment of the story. Regardless of the authenticity of the reports, they testify to the Islamic knowledge of the Christian versions of the story of the Youths of Ephesus.

How did early transmitters access the story of the Youths? Muqātil did not provide a source for his exegetical narrative. Nevertheless, he was known in Islamic circles as an exegete who used material from Christian and Jewish lore.495 He was criticized by some later authorities, as seen in comments on him in biographical dictionaries, for being an

493 Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās in Abbasid-era Tafsīr,” 499-501. 494 Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 243-246. 495 Plessner and Rippin, “Muḳātil b. Sulaymān,” EI2; Mehmet Akif Koç, “A comparison of the references to Muqātil b. Sulaymān (150/767) in the exegesis of al-Thaʿlabī (427/1036) with Muqātil’s own exegesis,” JSS 53, no. 1 (2008): 70-1, 76.

149 unreliable ḥadīth transmitter, and for excessive interpretation in exegesis,496 a practice he engaged with in order not to leave any qur’ānic term, notion or narrative unclear.497 It is likely that for details in certain narratives he sought information from Christian hagiography through the oral and homiletic tradition in late antique Arabia, Syria, or

Palestine, where he is known to have traveled to. The exegetical tradition also points at more specific contexts. For example, al-Qummī, likely aware of the Christian resonances of the qur’ānic story, places the Jews who question Muhammad in the Christian city of

Najrān.498

In the Tafsīr attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās it is indicated that he gathered information from the Christians of Najrān.499 Ibn ʿAbbās, in this work, comments on the verse Q18:22, which reads as: “They will say there were three, the fourth of them being their dog; and they will say there were five, the sixth of them being their dog – guessing at the unseen; and they will say there were seven, and the eighth of them was their dog. Say, ‘My Lord is most knowing of their number. None knows them except a few. So do not argue about them except with an obvious argument and do not inquire about them among [the speculators] from anyone.’” He states that among the Christians in Najrān, the Nestorians (al-

Nasṭūriyya) say the Companions are three, the fourth one being their dog, Qaṭmīr; Jacobites

(al-Mār Yaʿqūbiyya) say they are five; and Melkites (al-Malkāniyya) say they are six.500

496 Plessner and Rippin, “Muḳātil b. Sulaymān,” EI2. 497 Koç, “Comparison of the references to Muqātil b. Sulaymān,” 77. 498 Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 31; Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 204. 499 Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 245. 500 Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 245.

150

The three Christian groups could have existed in Najrān by the eighth century, given the long history of Christianity in south Arabia, a location of great economic and political importance between the Roman and the Persian empires before Islam.501 There were important demographic and missionary movements from West Syrian (Jacobite), East

Syrian (Nestorian), as well as Greek (Melkite) Christian communities to south Arabia, which makes it probable that this was a region where alternative versions of many biblical and hagiographical stories circulated. Even the homilies of Jacob of Sarug, although initially products of the eastern Mediterranean context, likely found their way to south

Arabian liturgical contexts.502 We know of at least one letter Jacob sent to the Christian

501 For a concise overview of Christianity in south Arabia in late antiquity, see Barbara Finster, “Arabia in late antiquity: An outline of the cultural situation in the peninsula at the time of Muhammad,” in Qur’ān in Context, eds. Neuwirth, Sinai and Marx, 61-114; Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Redefining History on Pre-Islamic Accounts: The Arabic Recension of the Martyrs of Najrān (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 15-22; Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs, 287-307; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 360-81; Tardy, Najrân, passim. For a brief yet very useful overview of the history of the Axumite (Ethiopian) kingdom, see Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Reconstructing the social and cultural history of the Axumite kingdom: Some mrthodological reflections,” in Inside and Out, eds. Fisher and Dijkstra, 331-52. For the Persian-Byzantine wars and their impact on Christian communities, see Michael Jackson Bonner, “Eastern sources on the Roman and Persian war in the Near East 540-545,” in Late Antiquity: Eastern Perspectives, eds. Teresa Bernheimer and Adam Silverstein (Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2012), 42-56; Philip Wood, “Collaborators and dissidents: Christians in Sasanian Iraq in the early fifth century ce,” in ibid., 57-70; Greg Fisher, “From Mavia to al- Mundhir: Arab Christians and Arab tribes in late antique Roman east,” in Religious Culture in Late Antique Arabia, eds. Dimitriev and Toral-Niehoff, 165-218. 502 In late antiquity Syrian bishops’ interest in south Arabian Christian communities is evident in their writings about south Arabian Church history, and their writings did not circulate only in the eastern Mediterranean context, but sometimes traveled as far as south Arabia. We will see an extensive example of this in Chapter 4 below. For the wide circulation of homiletic literature in late antiquity, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 36-37, 244-46. Among the fundamental works on Jacob of Sarug’s reception in later Christian Arabic literature are: Samir Khalil Samir, “Un exemple des contacts culturels entre les églises syriaques et arabes: Jacques de Saroug dans la tradition arabe,” in III° Symposium Syriacum, 1980: Les contacts du monde syriaque avec les autres cultures (Goslar 7-11 Septembre 1980), ed. René Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 221 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1983), 213-45; Alin Suciu, “The Sahidic version of Jacob of Serugh’s memrā on the Ascension of Christ,” Le Muséon 128, no. 1-2 (2015): 49-83; Aaron Michael Butts, “The Christian Arabic transmission of Jacob of Serugh (d. 521): The Sammlungen,” Journal for the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 16 (2016): 39-59; idem., “Diversity in the Christian Arabic reception of Jacob of Serugh (d. 521),” in Patristic

151 communities in south Arabia, in which he addressed the sufferings of the Christian community at that place and included Christological teachings.503 Through such literary and religious exchanges, near eastern homiletic literature highly likely was known and preached in south Arabia.

Alternatively, Muslims might have projected their general knowledge on Christian groups in Najrān, imagining and portraying a diverse Christianity in that city. Whether this exegetical information and knowledge about the Christianity in Najrān was based on the reality of Christianity there, or it was an informed guess, this report is significant for it points to the multiple Christian traditions about the Youths of Ephesus, and Ibn ʿAbbās’ attempt to display his knowledge of these different traditions. Thus, we see a strand of cultural memory that places the occasion of the revelation of the qur’ānic verses and their exegetical tradition to the city of Najrān, which epitomizes a location where information about Christianity came from. We will now turn to the other narratives in sūrat al-kahf to build on to the mechanisms of transmission of stories between Christianity and Islam.

2.2.b. The Rich Man and the Poor Man in Q18:32-44

The 34 verses following the story of the Companions of the Cave elaborate on divine providence and retribution, both on earth and in the afterlife. In this section, there is a brief and generic narrative of a rich man who boosts about his earthly wealth and family, and is exhorted by a poor man who reminds him the ephemerality of them, and the calamity that

Literature in Arabic Translations, eds. Barbara Roggema and Alexander Treiger (forthcoming), 1-30; also see, Forness, Preaching Christology, 6 fn. 27. 503 Ibid., 115-31.

152 will fall upon those who associate others with God – the theme that the story of the

Companions of the Cave in the previous section of the sūra boldly underlines.

Coin for them a parable: two men, to one of whom we assigned two vineyards and surrounded them with palm-trees and set cultivated land between them; both the gardens produced their fruit and did not go wrong in any way; and we caused a river to gush between them; and [the owner] had fruit. He said to his comrade, when he spoke to him, “I have more wealth than you and I am stronger in my family.” He entered his garden, wronging himself. He said, “I do not think that this will ever perish. I do not think that the Hour is coming; and if I am returned to my Lord, I shall find a better resort than this.” When he spoke to him, his comrade said, “Are you ungrateful to Him who created you from dust and then from seed and then formed you as a man? But He is God, my Lord, and I associate no one with my Lord. When you went into your garden, why did you not say, ‘As God wills?’ There is no power except through God. If you think I am inferior to you in wealth and children, perhaps my Lord will give me [something] better than your garden and [perhaps] He will send on it a thunderbolt from heaven, and it will become smooth soil. Or in the morning its water will be lost in the ground, and you will not be able to seek it out.” His fruit was destroyed, and in the morning wringing his hands over what he had spent on it, for it had collapsed on its trellises, and he was saying, “Would that I had not associated anyone with my Lord.” He had no group to help him apart from God, and he was helpless. Protection there belongs only to God, the True. He is better for reward and better for punishment. (Q18:32-44)

The trope of a rich and a poor man, and the subsequent reversal of fortunes, is a common didactic, hagiographical theme in antiquity, and since the qur’ānic narrative is very generic, lacking any proper names, it is difficult to point at a specific pre-Islamic tradition that this narrative alludes to. One of the well-known stories of two men whose fortunes are reversed in the afterlife is the biblical story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke 16:19-31. Although I by no means suggest that the qur’ānic story and this biblical story are similar in the way in which the story of the Companions of the Cave is similar to the late antique story of the Youths of Ephesus, I still find it useful to dwell on

153 this biblical passage here. This biblical story widely circulated in antiquity, and some in

Muhammad’s audience likely recalled it upon his recital of the above qur’ānic story.

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” He said, “Then, father, I beg you, to send him to my father’s house – for I have five brothers – that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them” He said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:19-31)504

Despite the significant differences in the emplotment and detail, the overall narrative sequence between the two stories, the one in the Bible and the Qur’ān, are parallel.

504 The story is also in Diatessaron 29:17-26. H. Gressmann, Vom reichen Mann und armen Lazarus: Eine literargeschichtliche Studie (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1918); F. Ronald Hock, “Lazarus and Micyllus: Greco-Roman backgrounds to Luke 16:19-31,” Journal of Biblical Literature 106, no. 3 (1987): 447-463; Richard Bauckham, “The rich man and Lazarus: The parable and the parallels,” New Testament Studies 37, no. 2 (1991): 225-46; Ronald Hock, “Lazarus and Dives,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 4: 266-7; Ferdinand O. Regalado, “The Jewish background of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus,” Asia Journal of Theology 16, no. 2 (2002): 341-9; Outi Lehtipuu, The Afterlife Imagery of Luke’s Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Leiden: Brill, 2007); John Szukalski, Tormented in Hades: The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) and Other Lucan Parables for Persuading the Rich to Repentence (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013).

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In the biblical story, the rich man, who received good things in his lifetime is tormented in hell, while Lazarus, who received seemingly bad things in the earthly life, is comforted in heaven. In the qur’ānic story the rich man boosts about his earthly wealth and family, does not believe in the Hour, and says that even in the afterlife his tidings will be good, while the poor man exhorts him and reminds him that God is the only one that gives and takes.

Eventually all of the wealth of the rich man is destroyed, and he repents having associated other deities with God (although in the former part of the narrative there is no discourse about him associating other deities with God, he was only being boastful). His helplessness is emphasized at the end of the pericope. In addition to the reversal narrative, the rich man’s remorse in hell in the Bible and his helplessness finds a close correspondence in the rich man’s remorse upon the destruction of his wealth and his helplessness in the Qur’ān. The biblical narrative continues with a discourse of resurrection. Similarly, in the Qur’ān, the verses after Q18:44 emphasize the Day of Judgement, resurrection of souls and being presented before God in rows (Q18:48), and the deniers’ repentance – like the rich man in the biblical story.

The eschatological reversal of fate was certainly a common theme in ancient and late antique mythology,505 including the Palestinian Talmud where we find a similar tale about a rich tax collector and a poor Torah scholar whose fates are reversed after their death.506 As summarized above, the qur’ānic version is relatively closer to the Lucan story

505 See the parallel traditions studied in Hock, “Lazarus and Micyllus;” Bauckham, “Rich man and Lazarus.” 506 For the parallels between the version in the Palestinian Talmud and the Gospel of Luke, see ibid., 227-9. There is a shorter version of the story of the tax collector and the scholar in Moses Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis. Being a Collection of Exempla, Apologues and Tales (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1924), 119-20.

155 in its emplotment, for which we find a long and rich homiletic tradition. Basil of Caesarea

(d. 379), Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394), Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), Jerome (d. 420) and

Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), among others, have homilies on the Rich Man and Lazarus.507

The Qur’ān displays a knowledge of the Lucan passage 16:19-31, since it is echoed in a number of qur’ānic passages.508 It is likely that this knowledge was also used in sūrat al-kahf. The biblical narrative thematically fits within the over-arching themes of the sūra with its emphasis on the divine reward and punishment through antithetical examples. It was, however, reoriented towards the exhortations of the sūra, namely, God’s oneness and omnipotence. The biblical focus on Abraham’s bosom in heaven becomes a tangential detail for the Qur’ān, which emphasizes that God is the only one that can know and change one’s fate. Furthermore, the fact that the reversal of fate and the ultimate remorse in the qur’ānic narrative take place in this world – not after death –, adds to this qur’ānic reorientation. In Muhammad’s recital of the story, divine reward and punishment concern and regulate this world as much as they do after the Hour.509 Thus, in the Qur’ān we see an

507 Jerome, “On the Rich Man and Lazarus,” in The Homilies of Saint Jerome, Homilies 60-96, ed. Marie Liguori Ewald, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 57 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 2:200-211; Paul Bedjan, ed., Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug. Homiliae Selectae Mar Jacobi Sarugensis, with additional material by Sebastian Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006; originally Leipzig; Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1905), I: 364-423. Martha Vinson, trans., “Oration 14: On love for the poor,” in St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Select Orations, trans., idem., The Fathers of the Church 107 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 39-71, esp. 67; F. Allen, trans., Four Discourses of Chrysostom. Chiefly on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869). 508 Q26:96-102; Q67-6-11; Q7:50 etc. Elbadawi, Qur’ān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions, 200-202. Elbadawi does not point out the similarity between the biblical passage and Q18:32-44. Note that Suleiman Mourad points the similarity between Luke 1:26-38 and Q19:16-22. Mourad, “Qur’ānic stories about Mary and Jesus,” 15-17. So, we can talk about an even broader conversation between the Gospel of Luke and the Qur’ān. 509 For the multiple aspects of Muhammad’s preaching regarding the other worldy and worldy focus, see Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 116ff.

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Islamic recontextualization of a biblical story well-known and widely circulated in late antiquity. Christians in Muhammad’s audience possibly recognized the major tenets of the biblical passage in the qur’ānic narrative. How did later generations of Muslims perceive this qur’ānic story?

Exegesis of the Rich Man and the Poor Man

Interestingly, the exegetical tradition does not make a direct connection to the Christian tradition for the hermeneutics of this passage. Muqātil identifies the poor man as Yamlīkhā and the rich man as Farṭus [sic., probably a misspelling of Faṭrūs], as two brothers from the Israelites.510 In Muqātil’s narrative, the two men both inherited their father’s wealth, but while one gave it all away to the poor and the needy, the disbeliever kept it.

Identification of the rich man as Faṭrūs (Petrus?) is puzzling, since this character, if ever identified, is named Dives, Nives or Phineas in the Christian tradition.511 The poor man is generally named Lazarus (Laʿazar in the Peshitta and the broader Syriac tradition). Thus, it is not clear what Muqātil’s source for the name Yamlīkhā was. He might have named the character randomly for storytelling purposes, for, as Reynolds points out, Muqātil was known to have practiced tasmiyya frequently,512 and Yamlīkhā, as seen in the example of the Companions of the Cave, was a name of a believer and denier of idols in the Islamic

510 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 2:584-5. 511 Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke (Cambridge, UK; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), 606 fn. 338; Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke. A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), 634-5; Jerome, “On the Rich Man and Lazarus,” 209. 512 Tasmiyya in this context refers to the practice of naming characters for storytelling purposes, although it has broader connotations and applications, such as pronouncing the divine names of God. B. Carra de Vaux and L. Gardet, “Basmala,” in EI2.

157 tradition.513 The two men are identified as Israelites in Muqātil’s account. Note that in the

Tafsīr of Ibn ʿAbbās the poor man is said to be a believer named Yahūdha, and the rich man is a disbeliever (kāfir) named Abū Faṭrūs.514 In the Palestinian Talmud version of the story, the rich man is called Bar Ma’yan (or Baya), and the poor man is not named.515 Thus, although the reports in Islamic literature appear to point to a Jewish source for the exegesis of the narrative, there does not appear to be a clearly identified text underlying the information provided in Islamic literature for the story of the rich man and the poor man.

Al-Ṭabarī is intriguingly silent about any details of the story. The exegetical reports he gives are mostly paraphrastic and philological.516 He likens the poor man in this story to Muslim ascetics Salmān (al-Fārisī), and Ṣuhayb and Khabbāb.517 The latter were two poor Companions of Muhammad, and here they are portrayed as ascetics like Salmān.518

This analogy is interesting, for al-Wāḥidī also makes connections with sūrat al-kahf and the pious poor, as mentioned previously.519 This seems to be a later interpretation of the sūra as an exhortation on asceticism, which is not directly evident from the qur’ānic narrative itself.

The parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man complements sūrat al-kahf’s overarching messages on God’s oneness, omnipotence, and the veracity of the Hour. The passage, however, did not receive much attention from the exegetes, except for minor

513 Reynolds, Qur’ān and its Biblical Subtext, 201. 514 The rest of his exegesis is paraphrastic and lexical. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 247. 515 Bauckham, “Rich man and Lazarus,” 227; Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis, 119. 516 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:222-7 (§23054-23076) 517 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:225 (§23066). 518 M.J. Kister, “K̲ h̲ abbāb b. al-Aratt,” in EI2. 519 Guezzu, Al-Wāḥidī’s Asbāb al-Nuzūl, 152-3.

158 details, such as the names of the protagonists. Due to the lack of specific information in the exegetical tradition it is difficult to see the role of Christian homily and hagiography in hermeneutics of this narrative. The narratives that follow that of the rich man and the poor man are that of Moses and of the Two-horned, which together present a complex hagiographical phenomenon, to which we now proceed.

2.2.c. Moses, the unnamed servant of God, and the Two-horned in Q18:60-100

In the verses 60 to 82, Moses and his young servant (fatā) reach a place where two seas meet, and realize they left behind the fish they had caught. When they return to retrieve their catch, they (or only Moses himself) encounter “one of [God’s] servants” whom God taught certain knowledge. Moses wants to follow him, while the servant of God, unnamed throughout these verses, 520 warns him to be patient and advises him not to ask any questions. Then, this unnamed character tears down a ship, kills a young boy, and restores a wall in a town where the local people refuse to give food to him and Moses. All of these acts surprise Moses, and in each instance, he is reminded to be patient about judging the situation. Moses’s unnamed companion explains why he did the things that had appeared counter-intuitive; every act was done to protect believers from certain danger.

Immediately after this episode comes the story of the Two-horned (Dhū al-

Qarnayn), a traveling king in the service of God, extending through the verses 83-100. He travels from where the sun sets to where it rises, with the God-given might to punish the

520 Some identify him as Moses’ servant, while others state he was a third character, in which case the Qur’ān is not clear what happens to Moses’ servant mentioned at the beginning of the narrative. The emplotment is too generic to be associated with a certain story. It in fact appears as a juxtaposition of various common literary tropes, such as searching for the spring of immortality (“where the two seas meet”), the wise servant, and the oppositional sage who teaches through counterintuitive acts.

159 wrongdoers and benefit the believers. When he reaches a mountain pass, people living there make supplication to the king to build a wall between them and the Gog (ya’jūj) and

Magog (ma’jūj), “corruptors in the land.” Dhū al-Qarnayn builds an iron dam between them. The narrative ends with an apocalyptic note, the king reminding the audience that on the Day of Judgement this wall will be levelled by God.

It is a point of debate whether this is one whole narrative or two separate narratives.

In the Qur’ān itself there are indications to support both arguments. For example, a close reading of these verses reveals allusions to a wide variety of literary traditions, some of which govern both of the narratives. On the other hand, both the Moses and the Dhū al-

Qarnayn stories start with the expression “wa-idh,” arguably marking separate parables, as in the rest of sūrat al-kahf. Ibn Isḥāq reports that one of the two stories in this qur’ānic sūra was that of the mighty warrior (the other one being the narrative of the Companions of the

Cave), but it is not clear what part of the verses Q18:60-100 Ibn Isḥāq referred to as “the story of the mighty warrior.” Exegetes of the Qur’ān generally treat these verses as two separate narratives, and present them as allusions to the story of the Prophet Moses and his encounter with al-Khiḍr (the Green One), and the Alexander Legend respectively.521 I will

521 The scholarship on the Alexander Legend is voluminous. The following are among the foundational works: Wallis Budge, The History of Alexander the Great: Being the Syriac Translation of the Pseudo-Callisthenes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889; new edition by: Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003); Budge, “History of Alexander the son of Philip king of the Macedonians (Syriac translation of Ps.-Callisthenes’ History of Alexander),” in ibid., 1-143; Budge, “Christian legend concerning Alexander,” in ibid., 144-161; Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh on Alexander” in ibid., 163-200; Theodor Nöldeke, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alexanderromans. Denkschriften der Keiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna, 1890). For a collection and translation of the Ethiopic versions, see Wallis Budge, The Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great: Being a Series of Translations of the Ethiopic Histories of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes and Other Writers (London, 1896). For a German translation of the Syriac Alexander Legend see C. Hunnius, ed. and trans., Das Syrische Alexanderlied (Leipzig, 1906). For the Greek and Latin versions of the Alexander stories see B. Kübler, ed., Alexandri Polemi Res Gestae Alexandri Macedonis Translatae ex Aesopo Graeco (Leipzig, 1888); Adolf Ausfeld, Der Griechische Alexanderroman (Leipzig, 1907); W. Kroll, Historia Alexandri Magni

160 analyze the formation and hermeneutics of these verses in three parts, since there seems to be significant changes in the emplotment at two points in the flow of the narrative.

Formation of Q18:60-100

Q 18:60-65

Recall when Moses said to his servant, I shall continue until I reach the confluence of the two seas, or else I shall go on for ages.” When the two of them reached their confluence, they forgot their fish and it made its way into the sea, moving freely. When they had passed on, he said to his servant, “Bring us our breakfast. We have found fatigue in this journey of ours.” He [the servant] said, “Did you see that when we took refuge on the rock, I forgot the fish – and only Satan caused me to forget to mention it – and it made its way into the sea – a wonder? He [Moses] said, “This is what we are seeking.” So, they went back on their tracks, retracing them. Then they found one of our servants, to whom we had given a mercy from us and taught him knowledge from us.

These verses share significant tropes known from various versions of the Alexander

Legend, such as Moses’ interaction with his servant, their arrival at “the confluence of the two seas,” and the escape of the fish.522 For example, in the homily of Jacob of Sarug,

(Berlin, 1926); S. Reichmann, Das Byzantinische Alexandergedicht nach dem Codex Marcianus 408 (Hein, 1963); L. Bergson, Der Griechische Alexanderroman: Rezension β (Uppsala, 1965); R. Merkelbach, Die Quellen des griechischen Alexanderromans, Zetemata, Monographien zur klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 9 (Munich, 1977). For the Armenian version, see A. M. Wolohojian, trans., The Romance of Alexander the Great by Pseudo-Callisthenes (New York, 1969). For Alexander in the Talmud, see I. Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud (London, 1948), Tamīd, 26-29. For a recent review of the scholarship on Alexander traditions, see Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus. A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: from Pseudo-Callisthenes to Ṣūrī (Paris; Leuven; Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2010); Richard Stoneman, Kyle Erickson and Ian Netton, eds., The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East (Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing & Groningen University Library, 2012). On Christian- Arabic works on Alexander, see Graf, Geschichte, 1:545-6. 522 Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 171-2.

161

Alexander orders his cook to wash a salted fish in every fountain until he finds the fountain of the Water of Life:

The king said to his cook, “Take thou a dry fish, And where thou seest a fountain of water, wash it. And if it be that the fish comes to life in thy hand when thou washest it, Reveal it to me and show me which is the fountain when thou have found it. […] Finally, he came to a fountain in which was the water of life, And he drew near to wash the fish in the water, and it came to life and escaped. […] And he leaped down into the water to catch it, but he was not able.”523

In the homily, the cook returns to Alexander to herald that he found the fountain of the Water of Life but cannot locate it again. In some of the Greek recensions, dated to not earlier than the sixth century, there are similar but shorter episodes, in which a salted fish comes to life and jumps into the water while Alexander’s cook was washing it.524 In the

Syriac homily, the cook deliberately searches for the Water of Life, by washing the fish at every fountain. In the Greek versions, he finds the Water of Life by coincidence. Despite the differences in the emplotment, the trope is familiar from the Alexander dossier, and the episode of Moses and his servant in the Qur’ān closely resonates with it.

As Brannon Wheeler emphasizes, it is difficult to establish a direct textual connection with the qur’ānic verses and these abovementioned texts. 525 However, his assessment of intertextualities is based on close, word-to-word, literary comparisons between the qur’ānic narrative and the other texts. In fact, there are cases where Wheeler

523 Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 172-4. 524 Bergson, Griechische Alexanderroman, 131-34. 525 Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 191-8; idem., Moses in the Quran and Islamic Exegesis (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). 10-14.

162 deems a direct relation between the two texts unlikely based on the fact that certain expressions are not verbatim repeated between them. 526 For example, he hesitates to identify the fish story in Q18:61-63 as the fish stories in versions of the Alexander Legend, because in the Qur’ān the fish is forgotten and slips back into the water, and in versions of the Alexander Legend the fish was dead and comes back to life when it touches the Water of Life.527 Wheeler states that thematic parallels could be considered as Muslim exegetes’ appropriation of motifs and conflation of characters known from extra-qur’ānic sources for their own purposes, instead of understanding them as “confused versions of stories borrowed from earlier Jewish and Christian sources.”528

Wheeler’s analysis is extensive, and the reservations he raises are helpful in assessing intertextualities. However, this strict literary approach has three shortcomings:

Firstly, it fails to consider the factor of oral transmission of stories in antiquity. There were probably many different versions of these stories circulating in the oral tradition, to which we do not have access, but Muhammad and early exegetes of the Qur’ān had.529 Secondly,

Wheeler’s approach assigns a high degree of agency to the Qur’ān for transmission and adaptation of stories, and does not account for hagiographical conflations that happened before and extraneous to the Qur’ān.530 And finally, his approach underestimates the deep

526 Ibid., 13. 527 Ibidem. 528 Ibid., 10. 529 This point is raised in Rosenthal, “Influence of the biblical tradition,” 41-44. 530 Hagiographical conflation is a very important phenomenon that frequently impacted and shaped the emergence, development, and circulation of saints’ dossiers. Some well-known examples are: John Calybites and the Man of God; St. Gerasimos and St. Jerome; St. Thecla and Mary (hence the naming of the shrine of Thecla as “Maryamlik” in Asia Minor). The phenomenon is therotically framed by intertextuality and confluence (as observed in Greek and Egyptian gods). Multiple examples are given, albeit without a significant theoretical discussion,

163 interconnectedness between various religious traditions in antiquity. Muslim exegetes were certainly using common hagiographical motifs and tropes in their writings, sometimes in the absence of a precedent text, but categorizing every narrative exegesis as such undermines transmissions of knowledge between multiple traditions. While searching for particular textual sources for qur’ānic passages has its disadvantages, pointing in the direction of possible conversations between different literary and oratory traditions is helpful in the study of the Qur’ān and its hermeneutics.

Wheeler states that based on the dates alone, Jacob of Sarug’s homily might be the source behind the verses Q18:60-65.531 This qur’ānic passage is certainly closer to Jacob’s version of the Alexander Legend, with a slightly different wording and emplotment.

Considering that the earlier narrative of the Companions of the Cave in sūrat al-kahf was likely in conversation with the Syriac homiletic tradition, it is probable that another narrative in the same sūra participates in a similar hagiographical conversation. As mentioned above, this conversation was most probably indirect. Jacob of Sarug’s homilies reflected the broader oral-biblical milieu of the eastern Mediterranean (what some scholars call “the interpreted bible”), and the qur’ānic discourse was informed and shaped by this same milieu.

One detail that remains puzzling in the qur’ānic passage is Moses himself in

Q18:60. This Moses is generally identified by medieval and modern scholars as the Prophet

Moses son of Amram, and his young servant who makes a brief appearance in this qur’ānic

in the lively chapter in Maya Maskarinec, City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 8-26. 531 Wheeler, Moses in the Quran, 12. See oppositions to the dating of the Syriac legends in Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 146-7.

164 narrative as Joshua son of Nūn, the Biblical prophet Joshua, Moses’ companion and successor.532 On the other hand, based on the parallels between this part of the qur’ānic narrative and the Alexander Legend, a considerable number of scholars have suggested that

Moses in Q18:60 should be identified as Alexander the Great.533 As Wheeler points out, the parallels are mere thematic resonances and resemblances, and there are no verbatim parallelisms between these qur’ānic verses and the pre-Islamic texts. There is, however, more to say about this possibility of identification of Moses with Alexander in Q18:60.

The qur’ānic narrative, with the verse Q18:82 and thereafter, has significant parallels with the Alexander Legend, to which we will turn shortly, and it is possible that the Legend was alluded to in the earlier verses in sūrat al-kahf as well. Moreover, in the

Christian Syriac Alexander Legend there is a mountain called Mūsās (in Jacob’s homily the mountain is called Māsīs or Masis).534 Alexander and his soldiers eat bread on this mountain and note that Moses and his servant were about to eat their morning meal before the fish leaped into the water miraculously. In an oral recension of the Syriac Alexander

Legend, the name of this mountain might have been confused with the name of the prophet

Moses, which the qur’ānic passage likely preserved. More than a possibility of a name confusion, there are textual traditions indicating that the image of Moses and Alexander could be conflated in late antiquity, prior to Muhammad.

532 B. Heller- [A. Rippin], “Yūs̲ h̲ aʿ b. Nūn,” in EI2; Ex. 17:8-16; Josh. 1:1-9. 533 Israel Friedlaender developed this theory, although scholars before him had suggested this identification. Israel Friedlaender, Die Chadhirlegende und der Alexanderroman; eine sagengeschichtliche und literhistorische Untersuchung (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 63. For a summary of the scholarship see Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 192-3. 534 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 148; Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 168.

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Alexander is often referred to as having horns in the Hellenistic, Jewish, and

Christian traditions. 535 In the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend, for example, he is referred to as being granted iron horns by God.536 He is also depicted with horns on

Ptolemaic coins, as well as in other forms of artwork.537 Moses was also associated with having horns, particularly in the Latin tradition. When Jerome (d. 420) translated the

Hebrew Bible, he translated the “rays of light” in Exodus 34:29 as “horns” (cornuta).538

Although this early fifth-century translation choice was not reflected in art until the eleventh century, it might have circulated in oral tradition, considering particularly that horned deities were very common in multiple mythological traditions in the eastern

Mediterranean in antiquity.539

Horns, symbol of power, authority, divinity, indestructability, among others, is not the only common attribute between Moses and Alexander. As Wheeler points out, in a broader perspective, they are both prophet-kings that bring God’s message to their people, lead their people, and search for knowledge and wisdom.540 In more specific terms, their

535 Nöldeke, History of the Qur’ān, 115 fn.137; Ernst Tonsing, “From prince to demi-god: The formation and evolution of Alexander’s portrait,” in Alexander’s Revenge: Hellenistic Culture through the Centuries, eds. Jon Asgeirsson and Nancy Van Deusen (Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press, 2002), 93-4; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 145-150. 536 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 146, 156. 537 Johann Bernouilli, Die Erhaltenen Darstellungen Alexanders des Grossen. Ein Nachtrag zur Griechischen Ikonographie (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969), plate viii, figure 4; Andrew Stewart, “Alexander in Greek and Roman art,” in Brill’s Companion to Alexander the Great, ed. Joseph Roisman (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), figure 8-11. 538 Jennifer L. Koosed, “Moses: The Face of Fear,” Biblical Interpretation 22 (2014): 417; Ex. 34:29 “When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.” 539 Koosed, “Moses,” 417-9; Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California, 1970), 1-2. 540 Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 213.

166 hagiographical traditions (both of Egyptian origin) share many tropes. 541 A brief comparison between the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria’s (d. ca.50) On the Life of

Moses, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, and versions of the Alexander Legend reveal numerous thematic similarities. Both Moses and Alexander are born at the palace as special, strong, healthy infants.542 They both gain wisdom when they were still infants, exhorted by philosophers and God.543 Moses and his brother/companion’s relationship is reminiscent of Alexander and his cook.544 Both are depicted as skillful commanders. Beasts and plagues overcome, and sorcery and magic (particularly through water) are other repeated themes.545 Note that Constantine I (d. 337) was depicted as the new Moses in the

Life of Constantine by his biographer Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339).546 Similarly, Moses’ image as the divine king and commander might have impacted the development of the

Alexander dossier in late antiquity. Alexander’s dossier is also known to have found echoes

541 On the Egyptian origin of the Alexander Legend, see Budge, History of Alexander, xxxv-li. 542 F. H. Colson, trans., “Moses I,” in Philo, LOEB Classical Library 289 (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1935), 4:I-IV; Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, eds., Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses, translation, introduction and notes by Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York; Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1978), 16-17; Budge, “Syriac History of Alexander,” 1-14. 543 Colson, “Moses I,” XIV; Malherbe and Ferguson, Life of Moses, 18; Budge, “Syriac History of Alexander,” 13, 18-21. 544 Colson, “Moses I,” XV; Malherbe and Ferguson, Life of Moses, 22-24; Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 173. 545 Colson, “Moses I,” XVII-XVIII; Malherbe and Ferguson, Life of Moses, 68; Budge“Syriac History of Alexander,” 1-14; Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 173-4, 178-9. 546 Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall, eds., Eusebius: Life of Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35-37; Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 130; Finn Damgaard, “Propaganda against propaganda: Revisiting Eusebius’ use of the figure of Moses in the Life of Constantine,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations, ed. Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 115-32. Also see Claudia Rapp, “Old Testament models for emperors in early Byzantium,” in The Old Testament in Byzantium, eds. Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010), 175-198.

167 in Christian hagiographical narratives, such as the Life of Makarios of Rome in late antiquity.547 He was, furthermore, occasionally depicted as a Roman emperor.548 In a realm where there is continuous conversation between the Alexander dossier and the surrounding biblical and hagiographical traditions, it is likely that the images of Moses and Alexander were conflated in some stories before the seventh century, and the qur’ānic verses Q18:60-

65 might testify to this Moses-Alexander conflation.

Q 18:65-82

Then they found one of our servants, to whom we had given a mercy from us and taught him knowledge from us. Moses said to him, “May I follow you on condition that you teach me, from which you have been taught, a right way?” He said, “You will not be able to bear with me. How can you bear patiently that which you have not encompassed in experience?” [Moses] said, “If God Wills, you will find me steadfast. I shall not go against you in anything.” He said, “If you follow me, do not ask me about anything until I make the first mention of it to you.” The two of them went off; then, when they were sailing in the ship, he holed it. [Moses] said, “Have you holed it to drown the people in it? You have done a dreadful thing.” He said, “Didn’t I tell you that you could not bear with me?” [Moses] said, “Do not take me to task because I forgot. Do not impose difficulty on me because of my affair.” The two of them went off; then, when they met a youth, and he slew him, [Moses] said, “Have you killed an innocent soul, not [responsible for the slaying of another] soul? You have done an abominable thing.” He said, “Didn’t I tell you that you could not bear with me?” [Moses] said, “If I ask you about anything after this, do not allow me to remain in your company. You have received excuse from me for not doing so.” The two of them went off; then, when they came to the people of a settlement, they asked its people for food. They refused to give them hospitality, but [when] the two of them found a wall there on the point of falling down, he set it straight. [Moses] said,

547 Panagiotis Roilos, “Phantasia and the ethics of fictionality in Byzantium: A cognitive anthropological perspective,” in Medieval Greek Storytelling, ed. Roilos, 21-22. Dates varying between the 6th and the 8th century are proposed for the dating of the Life. Ibid., 19 fn. 55. 548 Ioli Kalavrezou, “The marvelous flight of Alexander,” in Medieval Greek Storytelling, ed. Roilos, 103-14.

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“Had you wished, you could have taken payment for it.” He said, “This is the parting between you and me. I shall tell you the interpretation of that which you could not bear patiently. As for the ship, it belonged to some poor people working at sea. I wished to make it unsound, for there was a king beyond them who was seizing every ship by force. As for the youth, his parents were believers, and we feared that he might impose on them insolence and unbelief. We wanted their Lord to give them in exchange [one] better than him in purity and nearer in tenderness. As for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys in the town; and there was beneath it a treasure belonging to them; their father had been a righteous man, and your Lord wished them to reach maturity and [then] bring forth their treasure as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do it of my own bidding. This is the interpretation of what you could not tolerate.

The unnamed sage that Moses (or Alexander?) encounters in Q18:65 is an obscure character who instructs Moses through counterintuitive acts of wisdom (note that it is not clear what happens to Moses’ servant mentioned in the preceding verses). During his travel with Moses, he tears down a ship, kills a young boy, and restores a wall in a town where the local people refuse to give food to him and Moses. All of these acts surprise Moses, and in each instance, he is reminded to be patient about judging the situation. Moses’s unnamed companion explains why he did the things that appeared counter-intuitive at first; every act was done to protect believers from certain danger. His instructing Moses through adversity is certainly a narrative built upon a common hagiographical trope in Near Eastern folklore, as seen in the story of Elijah and Rabbi Joshua ben Levi from the Jewish tradition,549 and in the Christian story of the Angel and the Hermit.550

549 Nissīm ben Jacob b. Shāhīn, An Elegant Composition Concerning Relief after Adversity (Ḥibbur Yafeh me-hay-Yeshu’ah), trans. William M. Brinner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 550 A hermit encounters an angel. During their travels, the angel strangles the child of a soldier who hosted them; steals a golden cup from another host; throws an old man into the river; and gives the golden cup to an inhospitable man. As the hermit thinks this could possibly not be an angel of God, the angel explains him every one of these seemingly terrifying actions. After

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To my knowledge, the prophet Moses was never instructed by adverse acts of wisdom in the earlier Jewish or Christian traditions of the eastern Mediterranean. If we take Moses in these verses as Alexander the Great, the possibility of which I have demonstrated above, this unnamed qur’ānic character becomes relatively easier to identify.

In almost all of the versions of the Alexander Legend the king seeks wisdom through questioning sages or receiving exhortation from them without having inquired. In the

Syriac translation of Ps-Callisthenes’ the History of Alexander, for example, Alexander sees an immortal king in a cave who showed Alexander the “maker of all natures.”551 In the homily of Jacob of Sarug, Alexander speaks to an “old, grey-headed man, who knew the way and was experienced in the mysteries of the country.”552 It is this old man who advises Alexander to command his cook to wash salted fish in every fountain until he finds the fountain of the Water of Life. These motifs in the Syriac tradition might explain the qur’ānic narrative about Moses and the unnamed sage. The generic nature of the qur’ānic story leaves significant narratological space for details in the exegetical tradition, to which we will return shortly.

Q 18:83-100

Immediately after the story of Moses and the unnamed servant of God comes the story of

Dhū al-Qarnayn (the Two-horned), extending from verse 83 to 100 in sūrat al-kahf. In this narrative, the Two-horned is given the entire world, and the might to punish the

hearing the angel’s explanations, the hermit asks for forgiveness. G. B. ed., Ancient Moral Tales from the Gesta Romanorum (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 45-47. 551 Budge, “Syriac History of Alexander,” 126-7. 552 Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 171.

170 disbelievers and to treat believers justly. He encounters a people who complain about Gog and Magog and make supplication to him to build a dam between them and the dangerous

Gog and Magog. The Two-horned builds the dam, and at the end of the narrative reminds the people that protection and providence is provided by his omnipotent Lord.

They will ask you about Dhū l-Qarnayn. Say, “I shall recite to you a mention of him.” We established him upon the earth and gave him a way through everything. He followed a way; then, when he reached the place where the sun sets, he found it setting in a muddy spring, and he found a people around it. We said, “O Dhū l-Qarnayn, either punish them or take a way of kindness concerning them.” He said, “As for those who do wrong, we shall punish them. Then they will be returned to their Lord. He will punish them with an abominable punishment. As for those who believe and act righteously, they will have the fairest reward as a recompense, and we shall give them ease in our bidding.” Then he followed a way; then, he reached the place where the sun rises, he found it rising on a people for whom we had made no shelter from it. So [it was]; and we encompassed in [our] experience what was [there] with him. Then he followed a road; then, when he reached the place between the two barriers, he found on this side of them a people who could scarcely understand any speech. They said, “O Dhū l-Qarnayn, Gog and Magog are wreaking mischief in the land. May we pay you tribute on condition that you put a barrier between us and them?” He said, “The power my Lord has given me is better; but help me with [all the] strength [you can], and I shall set up a rampart between you and them. Bring me pieces of iron.” Then, when he had levelled up the gap between the two cliffs, he said, “Blow.” Then, when he had made it a fire, he said, “Bring me copper and I shall pour it over [when it is] molten.” They were unable to scale it or to pierce it. He said, “This is a mercy from my Lord. But when the promise of my Lord comes to pass, He will make it a flattened surface. The promise of my Lord is true.” On that day We shall leave them surging into one another, and there will be a blast on the trumpet. Then we shall gather them together. On that day we shall present Hell to the unbelievers.

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Kevin van Bladel, following Nöldeke, demonstrates that the story of Dhū al-

Qarnayn in the Qur’ān is closely related to the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend.553 As mentioned previously, Alexander the Great in the Syriac tradition was granted iron horns by God.554 Dhū al-Qarnayn says he will punish the wrong-doers in the Qur’ān; similarly,

Alexander in the Syriac text punishes the evil-doers by using them to test poisonous sea waters.555 In both the Qur’ān and the Syriac Legend Alexander travels from where the sun sets towards where it rises. The qur’ānic Gog and Magog, Dhū al-Qarnayn’s building a wall of iron and brass between two mountains, and the apocalyptic prophecy at the end, are all explicable against the background of the Syriac Alexander Legend. 556 In Van

Bladel’s words, “almost every element of this short qur’ānic tale finds a more explicit and detailed counterpart in the Syriac Alexander Legend.” 557 Yet, the qur’ānic discourse reorients the legend towards its overarching messages.

The rest of the sūra, continuing for another 10 verses (Q18:101-110), reminds about the Day of Judgement, the reward of the believers and punishment of disbelievers, and

God’s oneness, which are the recurrent themes of the sūra throughout:

Whose eyes were covered against my reminder and who were unable to hear. Do those who disbelieve reckon that they can take my servants as protectors apart from me? We have prepared Hell as hospitality for the unbelievers. Say, “Shall we inform you who will be the greatest losers in their works? Those whose efforts go astray

553 Kevin Van Bladel “The Alexander Legend in the Quran 18:83-102,” in The Quran in Its Historical Context, ed. Reynolds, 175-203; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 145-50. For objections to identifying Dhū al-Qarnayn as Alexander, see ibid., 135-38. 554 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 146, 156; Van Bladel, “Alexander legend,” 180. 555 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 147-48; Van Bladel, “Alexander legend,” 181. 556 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 150-3; Van Bladel, “Alexander legend,” 181. 557 Ibid., 181. Q30:1-6 refers to the wars between Romans and Persians and says Romans are destined to conquer. This could also be related to the apocalyptic material in the Syriac Alexander Legend. Van Bladel, “The Alexander legend,” 191.

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in the life of this world, when they think they are doing good deeds. Those are the ones who do not believe in the signs of their Lord or in [their] encounter with Him. Their works are in vain, and we shall not assign any weight on them on the Day of Resurrection. That is their reward: Hell, in return for their having disbelieved and having taken my signs and my messengers in mockery. Those who believe and do righteous deeds, the gardens of paradise are theirs for hospitality, in which they will stay forever, not desiring removal from there.” Say, “If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be exhausted before the words of my Lord are exhausted, even if we were to bring its like as a further supply.”558 Say, “I am only a mortal like you. It is revealed to me that your God is One God. Let those who hope to meet their Lord do righteous work and not associate anyone in the service of his Lord.”

Thus, the qur’ānic discourse connects the Dhū al-Qarnayn story to the overarching exhortation and warning of sūrat al-kahf, displayed through all of the four narratives analyzed heretofore. How did Muhammad’s audience, and the generations of Muslim communities after them, hear and perceive the verses Q18:60-100? For this we turn to the exegetical tradition once again.

Exegesis of Q18:60-100 and Christian hagiography

The Alexander Legend, particularly the Christian Syriac recensions, provides important parallels for both of the qur’ānic narratives, namely, that of Moses and his servant (Q18:60-

82), and of the Two-horned (Q18:83-100). The exegetical tradition, however, appears to have generally treated these two narratives as separate. Moses in Q18:60 is rarely

558 Cf. Midrash Rabbah on the Song of Songs I.3.1: “R. Eliezer said: ‘If all the seas were ink and all the reeds pens and the heaven and earth scrolls, and all mankind scribes, they would not suffice to write the Torah which I have learnt, and I have abstracted no more from it than a man would take by dipping his pen in the sea.’” I would like to thank Susan Harvey for bringing this comparison to my attention.

173 questioned to be any character other than the prophet Moses.559 His unnamed companion

(fatā) in Q18:60-65 is generally identified as the biblical prophet Joshua, Yūshāʿ bin

Nūn.560 The unnamed character (ʿabd) that Moses and his servant encounter is univocally identified as al-Khiḍr (the Green One) in the Islamic exegetical tradition. Al-Khiḍr is a complex figure, a manifestation of an archetypal character in Near Eastern mythology, symbolizing health, nature, healing, seafaring, safety, and wisdom.561 He is often conflated with the Jewish prophet Elijah, as in the Tafsīr of Muqātil b. Sulaymān. 562 He was also associated with Saint George of Lydda from the Christian tradition.563 Although I have not seen a direct reference to St. George in the exegetical tradition of the qur’ānic al-Khiḍr, in the Middle Ages some sanctuaries dedicated to St. George were converted to those of al-

Khiḍr under Islamic rulers, which shows the overlap of the two characters’ perception histories.564

559 There are exceptions to this identification, and we will see one of them in the next chapter. 560 Heller, “Yūs̲ h̲ aʿ b. Nūn,” EI2. 561 A.J. Wensinck, “al-K̲ h̲ aḍir (al-K̲ h̲ iḍr),” in EI2; Friedlaender, Chadhirlegende und der Alexanderroman; Irfan Omar, “Khiḍr in the Islamic tradition,” The Muslim World 83, no. 3–4 (1993): 279–294. 562 A.J. Wensinck and G. Vajda, “Ilyās,” in EI2; Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 2:594. 563 Su Fang Ng and Kenneth Hodges, “Saint George, Islam and the regional audiences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010): 264. We will review the essential background on St. George in the next chapter. 564 For sanctuaries dedicated to St. George and Elijah converted to sanctuaries for al-Khiḍr see Mahmoud Ayoub, “Cult and culture: Common saints and shrines in Midde Eastern popular piety,” in Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam, eds. Richard Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 109-110; Ethel Sara Wolper, “Khiḍr, Elwan Celebi, and the conversion of sacred sanctuaries in Anatolia,” The Muslim World 90, no. 3-4 (2000): 309–22; Elizabeth Key Fowden, “Sharing Holy Places,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002): 124–46; Frederick and Margaret Hasluck, Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans (New York: Octagon Books, 1932), 1:326–27, 320–36.

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Al-Ṭabarī gives a few reports in which it is said that the reason Moses encountered this unnamed character is because he inquired whether there was anybody wiser than himself, and God wanted to teach him through this wiser servant of God, who is identified as al-Khiḍr.565 None of the reports al-Ṭabarī cites gives further information about the character of al-Khiḍr. In his History, however, al-Ṭabarī states that al-Khiḍr led vanguard of Dhū al-Qarnayn the Elder, accompanying the latter in his travels.566 Brinner notes that the cognomen “the Elder” was used in this report to distinguish this mythical Alexander from the historical one, who lived much later than the legendary al-Khiḍr.567 Despite the scarcity of reports, we see glimpses of a possible association between the qur’ānic Moses story and the Alexander Legend in the exegetical tradition.

As Friedlaender pointed out, the legend and figure of al-Khiḍr could be integrated to some versions of the Alexander Legend at a later stage.568 There might indeed be a pre-

Islamic version of the story of Alexander that includes al-Khiḍr as a companion of

Alexander, which could be reflected in the emplotment of the qur’ānic narrative and its exegetical tradition. As shown above, in the homily of Jacob of Sarug, in the Syriac

565 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 8:250-6. On Moses and his servant, also see Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 1, book 3, § 74, §78, §123, §124; vol. 3, book 36, §467; vol. 3, book 50, §888; vol. 4, book 55, §612, §613. 566 William Brinner, trans., The History of Al-Ṭabarī (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 3:1-5. In the anonymous twelfth/fourteenth-century Alexander Legend in the Persian tradition, the Iskandarnāmah, al-Khiḍr accompanies Alexander in his search for the Water of Life. Minoo Southgate, trans., Iskandarnāmah: A Persian Medieval Alexander Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 55-58, 198; Hugh Talat Halman, Where the Two Seas Meet: The Qur’ānic Story of al-Khiḍr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries as a Model of Spiritual Guidance (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitale, 2013), 8, 250-1; Marina Gaillard, trans., Alexandre la Grand en Iran: Le Dārāb Nāmeh d’Abu Tāher Tarsusi (Paris: De Boccard, 2005), 382-400. 567 Ibid., 2 fn.7. 568 Friedlaender, Chadhirlegende und der Alexanderroman, 56-61, 63, 109, 116. Ibn Hishām identifies the mighty traveler as Alexander. “He built Alexandria and it was named after him.” Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 719 n.186.

175 translation of Ps.-Callisthenes’ History of Alexander, which Nöldeke dated to the seventh century, and in the apocalyptic Syriac Alexander Legend, based on the former two texts, the king does not have a companion named al-Khiḍr. But he often has a servant, or a wise sage instructing him. In a later Ethiopic translation of the Alexander Legend, al-Khiḍr is mentioned as one of the generals of Alexander. 569 It is likely that this character was integrated to the Alexander Legend as a result of the Islamic interpretive tradition of the verses Q18:60-82. 570 The Ethiopic Alexander Legend is generally accepted to be a translation based on the Arabic translation of the Legend, which dates to the ninth century.571 Since there are Islamic exegetical reports about al-Khiḍr predating the ninth century, it is highly probable that the Ethiopic tradition incorporated this character from

Islamic literature.

The narrative of Dhū al-Qarnayn, extending through verses Q18:83-100, was univocally interpreted as a reiteration of the Alexander Legend in qur’ānic exegesis. The relation of these verses to the Syriac-Christian legend was likely known, and further brought to fore by exegetes of the Qur’ān. Muqātil b. Sulaymān, for example, identified

Dhū al-Qarnayn as the King Alexander (al-Iskandar Qayṣar);572 the rest of his exegesis for the verses 83-100 is paraphrastic and lexicographical. Al-Ṭabarī’s exegetical reports demonstrate further knowledge of the dossier of the Alexander Legend, especially the versions in the Christian tradition.

569 Budge, Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great, 263-71. 570 Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 203. 571 Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 13-16. For the multiple layers of authorship of the Ethiopic text, with a possible Babylonian / midrashic source, see Ibid., 14-15. 572 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 2:599.

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Al-Ṭabarī’s tafsīr of these verses consists of 104 reports in varying length, which identify the Two-horned and elucidate the details of the qur’ānic story. The lengthiest of these reports are on the authority of the eighth-century Yemeni historian Wahb b.

Munabbih, to whom we will frequently return in the following pages.573 In this report, the

Two-horned is identified as a man from Byzantium, and his name was Iskandar. The latter’s placement in Byzantium associates him with the memory of the Christian empire at the very beginning of the narrative. Almost one-third of this account consists of

Alexander’s conversation and pact with God, who gives him the entire world in every direction, and the might (as well as all other skills) to rule the various peoples, the jinn, and

Gog and Magog on earth.574 Then, Alexander, with the help of his soldiers, gathers the people in the east to a place and invites them to the worship of God, like he does in the

Christian Syriac Alexander Legend.575 People make supplications to him to protect them from another tribe. At this point Wahb (or al-Ṭabarī) inserts the qur’ānic narrative of the building of a wall by Dhū al-Qarnayn, explicitly situating the narrative as qur’ānic exegesis.576 After this, Dhū al-Qarnayn travels to the west, and learns about the customs of people inhabiting there, which is reminiscent of the episode in the Christian Syriac

Alexander Legend, in which Alexander questions the people he encounters and their customs as he marches through the lands with his army.577 The water of immortality, or

573 Al-Ṭabarī, Tafsir, 8:280-3 (§23330). Wahb is one of the most cited authorities on stories about Alexander in the Islamic tradition. Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 139-141. On Wahb’s accounts of Alexander, also see Southgate, Iskandarnāmah, 196-201. 574 Cf. Budge, “Christian Legend,” 146-7. 575 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 149-51. 576 Q18:94-95. 577 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 149-50; Budge, “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 176-7.

177 travels with his servant are not mentioned in this report of south Arabian origin. Despite the inconsistencies, Wahb’s version has close parallels with the Syriac Alexander Legend, and therefore, his version should be considered in light of the Christian tradition, as a reiteration of it, reused in Islam for qur’ānic exegesis.

2.3. Concluding remarks on Christian hagiography and qur’ānic

hermeneutics

A detailed analysis of sūrat al-kahf demonstrates that homiletic literature served as important reservoirs of religious concepts, tropes, ideas, and expressions for parts of

Muhammad’s qur’ānic recitation. The Qur’ān, as scholars emphasize, thoroughly participated in the broader scriptural milieu. The narratives in sūrat al-kahf, namely the

Companions of the Cave, the Rich Man and the Poor Man, Moses and his servant, and the

Two-horned, all reflect a considerable knowledge of especially the Syriac homiletic tradition. Particularly works like those of Jacob of Sarug shed great light on the extents to which the Qur’ān reflected the late antique homiletic milieu and reoriented it towards its own semiotic system. Abridged reiterations of the late antique stories known as the Youths of Ephesus, Rich man and Lazarus, Angel and the Hermit, and the Christian Alexander

Legend, appear to have been recited by Muhammad in qur’ānic discourse towards exhortation of his audience on God’s oneness, omnipotence, and the Day of Judgement, the signs of which at times were counterintuitive.

The exegetes of the Qur’ān, possibly aware of this participation, appear to have turned to the Christian milieu to understand the qur’ānic discourse. Many early exegetes, quoted in the Tafsīr of al-Ṭabarī or in their individual works, like that of Muqātil b.

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Sulaymān and al-Qummī, provide significant details indicating not only the fact that they had access to Christian hagiographical knowledge, but also the dynamics and contexts where these exchanges likely took place. For example, the lists of names of the

Companions of the Cave in reports provided by al-Ṭabarī, and the names of those who wrote down the story in Muqātil’s account, as well as additional information about the various details of the story provided in the exegetical tradition, indicate the early community’s knowledge of Christian hagiography, especially in forms dispersed through homiletic use. We are also informed by early transmitters that there were memories in the

Islamic tradition as to where such exchanges might have taken place. South Arabia is one of the emphasized locales; a region where the rich history of Christianity solidified in

Muslim memory.

The analysis of sūrat al-kahf is useful not for providing clear answers to questions regarding the transmission of Christian hagiographical knowledge to Islam, but for raising more, intriguing questions. For example, in the processes of collection and organization of qur’ānic knowledge, transmitters like Wahb b. Munabbih became epitomes of catalysts of cultural transmission. The traditions by and about them point to particular contexts and dynamics of transmission of knowledge for qur’ānic hermeneutics, such as Wahb’s access to monastic libraries. This reshaping of the past often overshadowed the more ad-hoc means of transmission, such as traveling, storytelling, or listening to a homily, and the many agents that played role in these contexts of exchange, the glimpses of which we have in literary sources. Another question to raise here is how to theoretically distinguish between participation and transmission, and define authority and authorship, when we talk about shared cultural items and literary traditions. Last but not least, the exegetical stories

179 bring to fore the question of representations of qur’ānic personas. Exegetes navigated and negotiated the qur’ānic and Islamic representations of the strictly pre-qur’ānic saints and heroes. Were these literary strategies applied to broader Islamic literature while representing pre-Islamic personas? In order to address these questions, we should turn to other, non-qur’ānic uses of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, and cultivate a broader view of uses and reorientations of Christian saints’ stories.

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CHAPTER 3: NON-QUR’ĀNIC FUNCTIONS OF CHRISTIAN HAGIOGRAPHY IN ISLAMIC LITERATURE

This chapter presents a panorama of the multiple semiotic functions of Christian hagiography in Islamic literary contexts in the Middle Ages. It analyzes how saints’ stories, personas, and Christian hagiographical knowledge in broader outlines, having undergone long histories of transmission, were utilized and reoriented in various Islamic texts, for purposes other than qur’ānic hermeneutics. Christian stories and saints were used: 1) for didactic purposes, as symbols of universal wisdom and piety; 2) for encomiastic purposes, as excellences of cities and regions; 3) as etiologies for Islamic beliefs and practices; and

4) as members of the eternal Muslim community (umma). These categories certainly overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Despite this fluidity, developing a clear understanding of the multiple functions Christian saints’ stories and personas fulfilled in

Islamic literature throws immense light on the exchange, transmission, and reinterpretation of concepts, ideas, expressions, and other cultural items across confessional boundaries. In what follows, I will analyze four Arabic texts, written between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, and their varying modes of utilization and presentation of Christian hagiographical knowledge. When I compare the narratives in the Islamic texts with their

Christian versions, I do not claim a direct intertextuality between them, but approach the two comparanda as reference points on a continuum of creation, expansion, and transmission of a story. Except for the first text I analyze, there is voluminous scholarship on these literary works and the Christian/pre-Islamic stories embedded in them. My aim is

181 not to reconstruct these textual analyses to prove that Christian hagiography was used in

Islamic historiography, belles-lettres, hagiography, and other literature. Rather, I ask: How was Christian hagiography used and reoriented in different Islamic literary contexts? How did Muslim authors access, and through what kinds of literary tools did they engage with the Christian material? To what degrees and in what aspects were Christian stories and personas “Islamicised”?

3.1. Remembering Antony: Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s al-Wajal wal-tawaththuq bil-ʿamal

Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 894),578 a prolific scholar, moralist, and tutor in the ninth-century

Baghdad, at the beginning of his al-Wajal wal-tawaththuq bil-ʿamal, gives six reports from six different prominent Companions and Successors.579 The reports, from Muslim b. Yasār, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, Saʿīd b. Zayd, Muṭarrif b. Miʿqal, Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, and Wahb b.

Munabbih, all exhort the reader about doing one’s best of deeds in this world in order to avoid regret and remorse in the other world. 580 For example, the first two of these exhortations are:

Muslim bin Yasār: “He who hopes for something looks for it, and he who fears something flees from it. I do not know what good it does to a man to hope if he does not bravely suffer misfortunes that happen to him, and I do not know what good it does to a man to be afraid if he cannot leave alone desires that come to him.”

578 Abū Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b ʿUbayd b. Sufyān al-Qurashī al-Baghdādī. A. Dietrich, “Ibn Abī ’l-Dunyā,” in EI2; L. Librande, “Ibn Abī l-Dunyā,” in EI3; Dodge, Fihrist, 1:458-59. 579 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, al-Wajal wal-tawaththuq bil-ʿamal [Fear and Confidence in Deed], ed. Abū ʿUbayda Mashhūr b. Ḥasan Āl Salmān (Riyad: Dār al-waṭan, 1997), 25-30; trans: Franz Rosenthal, “The tale of Anthony,” Oriens 15 (1962): 35-60. I use the latter translation in this chapter, with some minor changes. 580 Rosenthal states that these sayings stress the importance of “acting confidently and independently.” Ibid., 35.

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al-Ḥasan (al-Baṣrī): “There are people who are diverted by wishful thoughts of forgiveness until they leave this world without having a good deed to their credit. Such a person might say, ‘I have a good opinion of my Lord.’ That, however, is a lie, for if he had had a good opinion of his Lord, he would have done good deeds.”581

Following the opening reports, the author writes: “Abū Bakr Ibn Abī al-Dunyā said:

Now, among the works of the ancients dealing with wise sayings and parables, we have found a book of wise sayings and parables that will make a sensible person want to abandon the fleeting life of this world and inspire him to working with confidence for the other world. This is a book ascribed to Anṭūnus al-sā’iḥ [Antony, the wandering ascetic].”582

After this introduction, he gives a frame story about the king Aṭnāws, who, 320 years after the time of Christ, on his death bed, advises his three dignitaries to select a new religious leader. In this selection process, a group of men, appointed by the king’s dignitaries, consults the ascetic Antony who had withdrawn from people to a mountain. The rest of Ibn

Abī al-Dunyā’s book consists of a dialogue between the religious leaders (who are in the process of choosing a new leader) and Antony. The men ask for his counsel on how to choose a king, upon which Antony replies: “I am going to exhort you and to tell you some parables (amthāl), which apply to you and your relationship to this world, seeing that you would know best how to make your own choice.”583

In the first part of the dialogue, Antony exhorts the men on the frailty of this world:

“Now then,” he said, “tell me, do you know how long you might live and be king?” They replied: “We do not know. It may be no longer than a fleeting moment.” “Then why,” he said, “do you take the risk of such unconcern?” They replied: “In the hope of a long life.” He

581 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 26-30; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 43. I have omitted the isnāds provided at the beginning of these reports. 582 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 31; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 44. 583 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 34; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 46.

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asked them how old they were, and they replied that the youngest one among them was thirty-five years old, and the oldest, forty. “Now assume,” he said, “that the longest you may hope to live will be twice as long,” and they agreed that they could not wish for more and that a longer life would not be desirable. He continued: “For the remainder of your lives you would want, would you not, and expect to have royal authority that will not fade, well-being that will not change, pleasure that will never cease, and life that will never end in death and that will never be troubled by grief, worry, or illness?” They replied: “We do hope that this will be so through the grace and mercy of God.” Whereupon he said: “Past generations which suffered the divine punishment had the same hopes and expectations as you do, and they neglected to act until they suffered their punishment. Those who believe in the truth of the reports about the fate of past generations must not grasp at hope unaccompanied by action. He who travels in the desert without water is likely to perish of thirst. I see, you rely upon hope where it leads to the perdition of your bodies, but you do not rely upon it where the prosperity of your livelihood is concerned. You furnish a house you know you will leave, and neglect to furnish the house in which you will stay. If you were told that a king with all his armies is going to attack you in your cities which you have built up and provided with dwellings and furnishings, and to kill their inhabitants and destroy their buildings, would you just dwell there and remain there quietly?” They replied: “No,” and he continued: “All human beings surely get to that point. But I will show you a city that is completely safe, in which no neighbor will hurt you, no governor oppress you, and no fruit ever fail you.” They said: “We know what you mean. But how could we do it, seeing that our souls love this world so much?”584

Upon the men’s inquiry about how to practice the renunciation of the world, Antony says he is amazed how people say they believe in prophets and their message, but still act ignorantly. The men ask him how he gained wisdom in human affairs, and Antony speaks to them about the benefits of reflection. He says that he reflects on the four sources of pleasure, namely, the four doors on the body, three in the head, and one in the belly, meaning eyes, nostrils, mouth, and penis.585 And he says: “I looked for a way to ease the

584 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 34-5; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 46-7. 585 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 46; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 47.

184 trouble caused me by these doors through which misfortune enters the world.”586 And he explains to them how he mastered these ascetic practices by withdrawing from people.

Then, Antony says, he removed the pleasures of property, children, wives, and political power by means of worry, grief, fear, and the remembrance of death. After explaining the forms of his asceticism, Antony continues his exhortation of the men with the nine short tales.

The parables attributed to Antony in the Wajal are generic, lacking any specific information, such as proper names. They are titled as: The owner587 of the snake, the owner of the vineyard, the owner of the ship, the owner of the fish, the Jew and the Christian, the man of the monastery, the blind man, the man of the dry river bed, and the man of

Affarūliyya [a place name]. All of these parables narrate secular life events. 1) A man insists on protecting and trusting a snake while everybody else warns him against the dangers of the animal; 2) a worker in a vineyard is subject to severe punishment, for he does not obey the rules of the owner of the vineyard; 3) a rebellious son perishes in the sea, seeking after wealth, despite his father’s warnings; 4) a fisherman deprives himself of a great fish for a meal, for he gives it to his neighbor who gives it away to the fisherman’s enemy; 5) a Jew and a Christian almost starve in the desert for not bringing enough water, before a Muslim saves them; 6) a man impresses, fools, and corrupts a community of monks with his grandiose beard, and is punished to death according to monastic rules for having sexual intercourse; 7) a thief years later returns the money he stole from a blind man; 8) a man dies in a flood for living in a dry river bed, despite the warnings of people; 9) and an army

586 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 46; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 47. 587 Can also be translated as “companion,” since the Arabic word used in these titles is ṣāḥib. W. P. Heinrichs, “Ṣāḥib,” in EI2.

185 perishes due to not taking enough provisions to a siege. All of these simple, sometimes comical stories emphasize that people ought to not risk the eternal punishment and perishing in the other world, and not take forgiveness for granted, since they have been clearly warned about the consequences (rewards and punishments) of their deeds in this world. After the parables, the narrative concludes thus:

When the six588 men praised Anthony for his fine remarks and his eloquent exhortation, he replied: “My sweet exhortation does not go any farther than your ears. Do you not know that the Law brought by Mūsā, the Psalter brought by Dāwūd, the Gospel brought by the Messiah, and the books of all the prophets contain the following statement: ‘You will be rewarded according to what you have done.’589 He who labors will be rewarded in accordance with his work. The hired man ought to know where he stands with regard to the master who pays his wages. Look at your works and then judge yourselves, and you will realize what is due to you and what you owe. Leave me and be guided aright!” They left him, and by lot chose and accepted one of their number as ruler.590

Antony in the Wajal

Many narrative features point that the Antony mentioned in this text is the renowned St.

Antony of Egypt (d. 356).591 The Antony in the Wajal is withdrawn from the world and its people, living in a cave on a nearby mountain. When the religious leaders come to consult him, he complains about the impossibility of a complete withdrawal from the world. He is portrayed as an ascetic who “shut the bodily doors of pleasure,” abstaining from sweet

588 There should be either three or five men consulting Antony according to the emplotment of the text. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 60. 589 This sentence is a verbatim quotation from the Qur’ān Q45:28; 52:16; 66:7. It is not clear in the text where the quotation from “books of all the prophets” ends. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 55; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 60. 590 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 54-5; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 60. 591 There were other saints with the name Antony both in late antique Egypt and later in the Middle Ages. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35-37.

186 smells, luxurious food, sight of pleasant things, and sexual intercourse.592 He defines the causes of earthly pleasures as property, children, wives, and political power.593 These are, of course, generic tropes of ascetic literature in late antiquity. But they also bring to mind themes from the hagiographical dossier of St. Antony. His withdrawal to the inner and the outer mountain,594 his ministry and guidance of lay and monastic people,595 as well as his ascetic portrait as a stern denier of bodily pleasures and needs, and his constant human effort to overcome them, are continuously emphasized in the Life of Antony.596

We have two other pieces of information that are important. The date “320 years after Christ” given at the beginning of the narrative by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā roughly corresponds to St. Antony’s life time. The other important information is embedded in the framing story of the king’s request to select a religious leader, which Rosenthal identifies as “complicated and […] needlessly confused.”597 The king’s name, Aṭnāws, is likely derived from that of the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), the biographer of St.

Antony.598 It is likely that he was presented as a king in later literature. Alexandria was

592 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 36-37; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 47-48. 593 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 37-38; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 48. 594 Gregg, Life of Antony, 68-97 (§50-§91). 595 Ibid., 89-94 (§81-§87). 596 M. J. Marx, “Incessant prayer in the Vita Antonii,” in Antonius Magnus Eremita, 113-116. On Antony’s renunciation of sex, food, and wealth, see Brakke, Athanasius, 226-38; cf. Wallis Budge, trans., The Paradise of the Holy Fathers (London, 1907), 2:13 (§46): Abba Anthony said: “He who lives in the desert is free from three kinds of spiritual attacks, that is to say, those which arise through the ears, speech, sight; he has only one kind to fight, namely, that of the heart.” 597 Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35. 598 Gregg, Life of Antony, 1-2; David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Claerondon Press, 1995), 201-65. For the debates about the authorship of the Life of Antony, see Gregg, Life of Antony, 1 fn. 1; David Brakke, “The Greek and Syriac versions of the Life of Antony,” Le Muséon 107, no. 1-2 (1994): 29-53. Note that in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, authored by Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ (tenth-c.), bishop of Ashmunein in upper Egypt,

187 traditionally governed by a prefect, viceregal appointed by the emperor, in Roman times.599

The bishopric and the later patriarchate of Alexandria was the imperially recognized

Church in the city, among other Christian groups.600 A man of Athanasius’ renown and influence, with an ecclesiastical career deeply interwoven with imperial politics, might have easily been depicted as a regal figure in the later collective memory of the region.601

It is worth noting that in the Coptic tradition Athanasius is represented as participating in theological debates before the emperor Constantius II (d. 361), which is absent in the Greek historiographical tradition,602 and he is portrayed as “the father of the faith,” as the founder and the great pastoral leader of the Coptic Church.603 Thus, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā is certainly creating a memory of St. Antony of Egypt in his text, using the hagiographical knowledge established by the Life of Antony written by the bishop Athanasius, and the latter’s legacy in the Christian tradition. Antony’s persona in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s text, however, is more complex, for which we will dwell on his conversation with the visitors.

The nine parables Antony narrates in the Wajal all revolve around a common lesson: one must not risk the punishment and perishing in the hereafter, since s/he is clearly

Athanasius’ name is spelled Atnāsyūs. Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ, Historia Patriarcharum Alexandrinorum I, ed. C. F. Seybold, CSCO 52 (Louvain: Imprimarie Orientaliste, 1954), 64. 599 Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 600 Brakke, Athanasius, 3. 601 For Athanasius’ legacy in multiple Church traditions, see David M. Gwynn, Athanasius of Alexandria: Bishop, Theologian, Ascetic, Father (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 159-194. For an overview of his works and biography, see George Dion Dragas, ed., Saint Athanasius of Alexandria: Original Research and New Perspectives (Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2005). Note that Paul the Apostle was also occasionally represented as a king in early Islamic historiography, in accounts about the earliest Christian community. Sean Anthony, “The composition of Sayf b. ʿUmar’s account of King Paul and his corruption of ancient Christianity,” Der Islam 85 (2010): 164-202. 602 Gwynn, Athanasius of Alexandria, 188-9. 603 Ibid., 192-3.

188 warned in this world. In all of the stories there is a person who brings death, a bodily harm, or a monetary loss upon himself, despite having been warned by other people before. After each parable Antony comments on the story, by saying how amazed he is at the fact that ostensibly intelligent people are not able to prepare for the hereafter, although they are warned. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā uses the same formula at the parts where Antony comments on the story, such as: “I marvel at those intelligent people who know the moral to be derived from such parables but do not make use of their knowledge,”604 and “I marvel at the man who amasses property to his own detriment and prefers others to himself,”605 and “I marvel at such preoccupation with hope and greed which deceives intelligent and stupid people alike until they perish together.”606 It is of great importance that Antony, through the pen of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, connects these parables to not piety but intelligence. Rosenthal states that this work reads as a “pamphlet against the concept of predetermination and in favor of the necessity, independence, and freedom of human action.”607 The emphasis on the clear and constant warning in each parable adds another semiotic layer. One is certainly free in his actions according to these parables, but it is incomprehensible and unintelligent not to prepare for the world to come, and not to see the clear signs and warnings of God.

There are no direct literary connections between these parables and the hagiographical dossier of St. Antony as we know it, except for minor parallelisms. For example, the tale of the Jew and the Christian who argue about perishing in the desert due to lack of water vaguely reminds an episode in the Life of Antony in which two men run

604 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 41; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 50. 605 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 46; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 54. 606 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 52; Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 55. 607 Ibid., 36.

189 out of water in the desert and one of them dies.608 There are also vague resemblances to these parables in the broader biblical, hagiographical, epic, and folkloric traditions of the eastern Mediterranean.609 For example, the second parable, about the two workers in a vineyard, one of whom is punished because of not taking serious the commands of the owner of the vineyard, echoes the biblical passage, Matthew 20:1-16, where a landlord hires workers for his vineyard, and pays them the way he sees fit. Although varying in motifs and emplotment, both of these stories underline that the workers of a vineyard have to abide by the rules of the landlord, which they were clearly told as their jobs were assigned. We will return to the possible connections of the Wajal to the Christian tradition.

The depiction of Antony in the Wajal, as a wise sage narrating stories of wisdom, certainly reflects some of the information provided in the Life of Antony. But more prominently, the Wajal is a continuation and expansion of his image in the Apophthegmata tradition.610 In the latter, different from the emplotment of the Life, and from his persona in his letters, Antony is portrayed as a teacher (didaskalos) often uttering a wisdom saying

(rhema), making an instructional remark (chreia) or narrating a short, spiritually beneficial

608 Gregg, Life of Antony, 75 (§59). 609 Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 38-41. Although the Jewish tradition is beyond the scope of this dissertation, it is worth noting that there was a strong pre-Christian Jewish tradition of wisdom sayings, such as the Ecclesiastes, that constitutes a significant comparandum to the Wajal and similar wisdom literature. 610 For examples of his sayings, see John Wortley, trans., The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Systematic Collection (Collegville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), §1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.44, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.14, 8.1-2, 10.1-5, 11.1-3, 15.1-4, 16.1, 17.1-5; Wallis Budge, trans., The Sayings and Stories of the Christian Fathers of Egypt (London; New York; Bahrain: Kegan Paul, 2002), 1:100, 125-8, 192-6, 199, 202; Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (London; Oxford: Mowbray, 1975), 1-9; Budge, Paradise of the Holy Fathers, 1:125-7, 141-2, et al.; 2:8, 13, 45, et al.; Zachary Smith, Philosopher-monks, Episcopal Authority, and the Care of the Self: The Apophthegmata Patrum in Fifth-Century Palestine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 126-37.

190 tale or anecdote (diegesis) to his visitors and fellow monks.611 His representation in the

Wajal lacks any Christian religious discourse; in fact, he is portrayed as an ascetic, whose speech involves qur’ānic quotations.612 Nevertheless, the mode of depicting him in the

Wajal very much reflects the Antony of the Apophthegmata. These didactic collections of sayings and anecdotes of mostly Egyptian monks and ascetics were put in writing roughly in the fifth century and reached wide readers and audiences among monastic and lay communities in the eastern Mediterranean already in the early sixth century. 613 The agglomeration of monastic-ascetic wisdom, a prominent cultural heritage of the medieval eastern Mediterranean, found a reverberation in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s work. The Wajal is practically an extended chreia of Antony.614 And it thematically elaborates on the six shorter chreiai of the Companions and Successors given at the very beginning of the work.

611 For an essential discussion on these classical literary forms’ function in the emergence of Christian hagiography, especially the apophthegmata, in late antiquity, see Rapp, “Origins of hagiography,” 19-30; also see Burton Mack, Anecdotes and Arguments: The Chreia in Antiquity and Early Christianity (Claremont, CA: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1987); Katherine McVey, “The chreia in the desert: Rhetoric and Bible in the Apophthegmata Patrum,” in The Early Church in Its Context: Essays in Honor of Everett Ferguson, eds. A. J. Malherbe, F. Norris and J. W. Thompson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 245-55. For the classical form of the chreia, see Ronald Hock and Edward O’Neil, The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric: Classroom Exercises (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002); Ronald Hock, “The chreia in primary and secondary education,” in Alexander’s Revenge, eds. Asgeirsson and Van Deusen, 11-36; Jon Asgeirsson, “The chreia as principle and source for literary composition,” in ibid., 37-58. 612 For example, Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 60. 613 William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 165-273 614 For apophthegmata as nucleus of longer narrations, see Hinterberger, “Byzantine hagiography and its literary genres,” 33.

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Wajal: An Islamic or Christian text?

Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, as Franz Rosenthal argues, possibly wrote the Wajal based on his broad knowledge of the ascetic literature and modes of religious expression in his time.615 One might, on the other hand, entertain his claim to have relied on a preceding text. It is worth noting that Ibn al-Nadīm mentions a book entitled “Anthony the Holy Man and the

Byzantine King” among the “Books of the Byzantines” in his bibliographical collection.616

Ibn al-Nadīm’s knowledge of this text might have relied on the note in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s text. But this is unlikely, since in his account on Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s works Ibn al-Nadīm does not mention this “Byzantine” text.

There is a visible absence of direct literary connections between the late antique hagiography of St. Antony and Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s text. Still, the Life of Antony’s popularity, esteem, and impact in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond in late antiquity and the Middle Ages barely needs to be stated.617 Shortly after it was composed in Greek

(and it might have had a prior Coptic origin), it was transmitted east and west, translated to numerous languages, expanded, and reworked. As Brakke phrases, “Antony the

Egyptian hermit was the inspiration for much ancient literature, not only biographies, but also sayings traditions.”618 He was depicted as a spiritual patron, a teacher of wisdom, and

615 Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35-44. 616 Dodge, Fihrist, 2:718. 617 Rapp, “Origins of hagiography,” 119; Gregg, Life of Antony, 13-17. 618 Brakke, Athanasius, 204. Among the most well-known texts inspired by the Life of Antony is Jerome’s (d. 420) the Life of Paul of Thebes, a literary response to the Life of Antony, which expanded the dossier of Antony. Marie Liguori Ewald, trans., “St. Jerome: Life of St. Paul, the first hermit,” in Early Christian Biographies, ed. Roy Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 225-38; also see Rapp, “Origins of hagiography,” 119.

192 the founder of eremitical monasticism in a wide array of writings in antiquity.619 Different portrayals of him highlighted different characteristics, sayings or writings attributed to him.

For example, in the Lausiac History, Palladius narrates a story about Antony indicating his reliance on the Life of Antony by Athanasius.620 Similarly, the Syriac Life of Antony, as

David Brakke shows, was probably a revision and expansion of the Greek Life, transmitted in numerous manuscripts between the sixth through the nineteenth centuries.621

In addition to the expansions and abbreviations of Athanasius’ work, there were also novel Antony traditions in the medieval Christian world. We know of Western hagiographical traditions and monastic treatises attributed to St. Antony in the Middle

Ages, partly informed by Athanasius’ depiction.622 In the ninth century in Rome, St.

Antony was venerated as a protector of animals, pointing to possible novel hagiographical depictions in that city.623 Moreover, there is a long tradition of writings on Antony in

Christian Arabic literature, including multiple forms of iterations of his life, teachings, and letters.624 Nevertheless, As mentioned previously, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony appears to be similar to the Antony of the Apophthegmata, with the incorporation of some basic information from the Life of Antony tradition, and this conflated representation was not foreign to medieval Christian communities. Thus, although I have not encountered a text

619 Brakke, Athanasius, 204-16. 620 Palladius, Lausiac History, 8. 621 Brakke, “ Greek and Syriac versions,” esp. 42-53. 622 Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 36-37; Jean Leclercq, “Saint Antoine dans la tradition monastique médiévale,” in Antonius Magnus Eremita 356-1956, ed. Basilius Steidle (Rome: Pontificium Institutum S. Anselmi, Orbis Catholicus, 1956), 241. 623 Maskarinec, City of Saints, 9. 624 Graf, Geschichte, 1:456-9. The list provided by Graf does not include a text that appears to be an earlier version of the Wajal. Graf’s work, although outdated, remains to be the major reference work for Christian Arabic literature.

193 that could be the vorlage of the Wajal in the Christian tradition, it is probable that there were similar novel Antony traditions in the eastern Mediterranean by the ninth century.

Furthermore, didactic-monastic pseudoepigraphical texts widely circulated in

Christian literature in the Middle Ages. For example, in a Syriac text roughly from the tenth century, the apostle Peter is depicted as exhorting his (monastic) audience on xeniteia and virginity, through a parable of a good and a bad servant (vaguely echoing the second parable in the Wajal, of the two workers in the vineyard).625 Similarly, in a monastic- didactic work of the bishop Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ (tenth c.), entitled Affliction’s Physic and the Cure of Sorrow, the author narrates stories of various prophets (such as Jesus,

Mani, Job, Abraham, and Moses) and quotes saints and philosophers (such as Basil the

Great, John Chrysostom, Antony, Macarios, and Pachomius) on the disease of sorrow and its cures.626 The circulation of these and such texts point at a literary market in which a similar didactic text, attributed to St. Antony, might have also circulated, in Arabic or

Syriac, a copy of which Ibn Abī al-Dunyā had access to. Note that Ibn Abī al-Dunyā says in the introduction that he found a work dealing with “wise sayings and parables,” and there is no reason to discredit this assertion (contrary to the argument of Rosenthal that the

Wajal was pseudepigraphy, written by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā). If such a Christian text likely existed, how could Ibn Abī al-Dunyā have accessed it?

625 Sergey Minov, “The exhortation of the apostle Peter: A Syriac pseudepigraphon and its monastic context,” in Scriptures, Sacred Traditions and Strategies of Religious Subversion, eds. M. B. Blidstein, S. Ruzer and D. Stökl Ben Ezra (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 167-81. Of course, such pseudepigraphy in the Christian tradition follows biblical models, such as Jesus’ parables in Matthew 13. 626 Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ, Affliction’s Physic and the Cure of Sorrow, ed. and trans. R. Y. Ebied and M. J. L. Young, CSCO 396, Scriptores Arabici Tomus 34 (1978): 1-38; CSCO 397, Scriptores Arabici Tomus 35 (1978): 1-27.

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Despite being remembered as a prolific teacher, little is known about Ibn Abī al-

Dunyā’s scholarly endeavors outside Baghdad and the court.627 Still, this context gives some important insight about his access to Christian hagiography. After the grand translation projects at the court of Baghdad and other locations, patronized particularly by the caliph al-Ma’mūn (d. 833), numerous texts were translated from Syriac and Greek, among other languages, to Arabic.628 The so-called translation movement was not the only point of encounter between Arabic-Islamic and Christian literary traditions at the court. We are informed of Christians who served as viziers and secretaries at the court, and produced books.629 Moreover, The Christian tradition preserves a memory of bishops and monks participating in religious debates at the Abbasid court.630 Those treatises mostly functioned as catechism for Christians living under Islam, using the trope of the caliph and his majlis

(sessions of religious debate) as framing tropes.631 Nevertheless, as Griffith states, the narratives might have preserved a historical reality, that is, monks and ecclesiasts often

627 Dietrich, “Ibn Abi ’l-Dunyā,” EI2. 628 For an extensive introduction to and overview of the so-called translation movement, see Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Bahgdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries) (London; New York: Routledge, 1998); also see D. Gutas, et al., “Tard̲ j̲ ama,” in EI2; Kevin Van Bladel, “The Arabic reception of late antique literature,” in A Companion to Late Antique Literature, eds. Scott McGill and Edward Watts (Medford, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 569-82. For the caliph al-Ma’mūn as a prominent patron of translation, see Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 244, 253-4; Michael Cooperson, Al-Ma’mun (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 84-88; 629 Dodge, Fihrist, 1:278, 286-7, 299. 630 Sidney Griffith, “The monk in the emir’s majlis: Reflections on a popular genre of Christian literay apologetics in Arabic in the early Islamic period,” in The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, eds. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh et al. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1999), 13-65; also see David Bertaina, Christian and Muslim Dialogues: The Religious Uses of a Literary Form in the Early Islamic Middle East (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011). 631 Griffith, “Monk in the emir’s majlis,” 13-16.

195 were invited to the Abbasid court for exchange and debate. 632 Such occasions of conversation might also have facilitated the transmission of texts and stories, like that of

St. Antony. In the Christian tradition such pseudoepigraphical texts are generally aimed at monastic audiences and their spiritual formation.633 In the Islamic, however, similar texts are oriented towards a courtly audience, to which we will shortly return.

Ibn Abī al-Dunyā is known for having rarely cited and significantly altered the source materials he used when he represented Christians and Christianity in his works.634

Yet, a close reading of the Wajal demonstrates that he certainly participated in what Muhsin al-Musawi calls a “heteroglossia of the marketplace,” an “open-market cultural economy” of poetry and prose that authors freely used in their own writings, with significantly flexible interpretations of intertextuality and plagiarism.635 He might have composed the Wajal with his broad knowledge of tropes and expressions, or of specific texts circulating in this market, which included voluminous material from pre-Islamic and non-Islamic traditions.

With the extant material, we will not know which one of these processes took place in the production of the Wajal. Nevertheless, the analysis of this text highlights two things: the broad literary horizon of Muslim authors beyond the Islamic material, and the extents of medieval Christian literature preserved in Islamic literature.

632 Ibid., 63. 633 Wortley, “Genre of the spiritually beneficial tale,” 71; Efthymiadis, “Redeeming the genre’s remnants,” 307; Binggeli, “Collections of edifying stories,” 143. 634 Cook, “Christians and Christianity in ḥadīth,” 77-78; Leonard Librande, “Ibn Abī al-Dunyā: Certainty and morality,” Studia Islamica 100/101 (2005): 12-13. For an analysis of his use of his sources, see James Bellamy, “Sources of Ibn Abī ‘l-Dunyā’s Kitāb maqtal amīr al-mu’minīn ʿAlī,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 1 (1984): 3-19. 635 Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 186-9.

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The Wajal in broader Islamic literature

The Wajal is a didactic text, a specimen of the voluminous adab literature.636 Adab, in its most basic definition, can be described as “suitable things to know and act upon.”637

Although it is generally translated as “literature/belles-lettres” or “humanities,” it encompasses more than these two modern concepts, corresponding to writings that aim at ethical formation, communicating transmitted knowledge (like ancestral customs), and occasionally entertainment. Adab works were composed in a wide array of genres, including thematically collected anthologies. Especially after the ninth century, didactic anthologies consisting of proverbs, qur’ānic passages, historical and semi-historical anecdotes became a powerful form of expression of one’s erudition, literary skills, and social competence among the educated elites in the Abbasid Caliphate.638 Ibn Abī al-

Dunyā, very much a court scholar, was a participant of this form of social expression, building his credentials amongst other prolific and well-known adībs such as al-Jāḥiẓ (d.

868) and Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), who were also active in the courtly circles of Baghdad.639

The didactic function of the Wajal is further highlighted by the sitz im leben of the text. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā tutored Abbasid princes al-Muʿtaḍid (d. 902) and al-Muqtafī (d.

908) in Baghdad. The Wajal, a narrative about the selection of a leader upon the death of a king, partly functions as a mirror for princes (a branch of the professional adab), 640

636 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab a) Arabic, early developments,” in EI3; F. Gabrieli, “adab,” in EI2; S. A. Bonebakker, “Adab and the concept of belles-lettres,” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. Ashtiany et al., 16-30; al-Musawi, Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, esp. 175-204. 637 Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab,” EI3. 638 Gabrieli, “adab,” EI2; Librande, “Certainty and morality,” 7-8; Antrim, “Watan,” 174. 639 Ch. Pellat, “al-D̲ j̲ āḥiẓ,” in EI2; idem., “Al-Jāḥiẓ,” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. Ashtiany et al., 78-95; G. Lecomte, “Ibn Ḳutayba,” in EI2; Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 251-2. 640 Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab,” EI3; Pellat, “Al-Jāḥiẓ,” 89.

197 examples of which are well-known in antiquity and the Middle Ages.641 Through the

Wajal, especially at the beginning of the dialogue between Antony and the leaders, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā exhorts his regal students on the perils of the love of earthly life and pleasures, temporality of power, health, and wealth. “Do you know how long you might live and be king?” Ibn Abī al-Dunyā asks through Antony; and again, through Antony’s parables he answers this fundamental question.

Parables do frequently appear in the genre of mirror for princes, as seen in the extensive use of “Indian” tales in the tenth-century author al-Māwardī’s Naṣīḥat al- mulūk.642 The fact that in the Wajal a renowned Christian saint advises in the process of selection of a king underlines the extent to which the spiritual authority of St. Antony was esteemed in the ninth century Islamic world. His hagiographical dossier might have been known only in broad strokes. Still, his memory as a wise ascetic exhorting people on piety and morality was very much alive. Moreover, as Gabriel Rosenbaum extensively argues, adab works often focused on intelligence as a fundamental component of piety.643 In the

Wajal, Antony continuously connects the parables he narrates to human intellect. St.

641 For one of the most recent reviews of the voluminous scholarship on the topic, see Regula Forster and Neguin Yavari, eds., Global Medieval: Mirrors for Princes Reconsidered (Boston, MA: Ilex Foundation, 2015). For a thorough treatment of one of the oldest specimens of this literature, see Vivienne Gray, Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes: Reading the Reflections (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 642 Louise Marlow, “Among kings and sages: Greek and Indian wisdom in an Arabic mirror for princes,” Arabica 60 (2013): 1-57. For another example of Arabic mirrors for princes, see Julia Bray, “Al-Thaʿālibī’s Adab al-muluk, a local mirror for princes,” in Living Islamic History: Studies in Honor of Professor Carole Hillenbrand, ed. Yasir Suleiman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 32-46. Note that not every mirror for princes was titled as such in Arabic literature. Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab,” EI3. 643 Gabriel Rosenbaul, “A certain laugh: Serious humor and creativity in the adab of Ibn al- Ǧawzī,” in Compilation and Creation in Adab and Luġa. Studies in Memory of Naphtali Kinberg (1948-1997), eds. Albert Arazi, Joseph Sadan and David Wasserstein (Eisenbrauns, 1999), 97- 130, esp. 113-21. Also see Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 250-1.

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Antony of Egypt, whose dossier highlights the saint’s debates and intellectual conversations with Greek philosophers of his time,644 was thus a suitable subject towards fulfilling the conventions of the adab literature of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s time.

In the Wajal and other similar adab works, Christian saints are placed among

Muslim saints and sages for the exhortative value of their deeds and sayings. In such compositions, the religious tradition that the Christian personas originally belong to is overshadowed by their representations as epitomes of piety, virtue, and morality. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s presentation of Antony in the Wajal underlines the hagiographical value of anecdotes of Christian saints qua Christian saints for the Muslim authors and their audiences. Surely Antony in the Wajal is embedded within an Islamic discourse. Yet, he is also explicitly portrayed as the pre-Islamic St. Antony of Egypt.

To have a better grasp of this semiotic detail, it is necessary to contextualize the

Wajal within Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s broader corpus of more than 100 works on piety and asceticism, only about 20 of which have survived.645 In the Wajal, a Christian saint’s wisdom and guidance is prologued by aphorisms of six Muslim ascetics. In many of his other works, the prophet Muhammad, Muslim saints, biblical prophets and heroes are quoted together for their knowledge, wisdom, morality, and piety. For example, in the

Kitāb al-yaqīn,646 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā gives reports about Muhammad, ʿAlī, Jesus, prophet

644 Gregg, Athanasius, 83-89. For wisdom as knowledge of the divine, see Smith, Philosopher- monks, 211. 645 Dietrich, “Ibn Abi’l-Dunyā,” EI2. Bellamy argues that about 40 works of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā survived. Bellamy, “Sources,” 4. 646 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Kitāb al-yaqīn [The Book of Certainty], ed. Muṣṭafá ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfīyya, 1993).

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Luqmān, among others, on the concept of “certainty in faith.”647 In the Kitāb al-faraj baʿda al-shidda he gives reports about Jonah, Joseph, Jacob, and various Companions, as well as the caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717-20).648 Thus, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, by placing

Antony among the prophets, saints, and sages he presented in the Wajal and his other works, contextualized Islamic edifying teachings within the broader ecumenical pietism and asceticism of the eastern Mediterranean.

Patricia Cox Miller’s analysis of collective biography in Christian tradition emphasizes that in such collections, rather than the individual story, the principle of organization behind the collection is the message the author wants to convey.649 In the late antique Christian collective biographies, such as the Vita Patrum of Gregory of Tours (d.

594) and the anonymous Historia Monachorum, “the subjectivity of holiness is the focus of the biographer, for whom the ‘diversity’ of the particularities of their existence is only important insofar as it serves the ideal of sameness.”650 This theory is directly applicable in a larger scale to the collective corpus of writings of an author. In Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s works, stories of pre-Islamic prophets and saints serve the overarching purpose of these works, namely, exemplifying forms and manifestations of Islamic asceticism and piety.

Miller argues that differences between saints in such collections fades, when the sameness of the stories is emphasized.651 The hyper-icon (the collection as a whole), Miller argues, is manifested through each of these stories that symbolize the same “type.” In certain such

647 Librande, “Certainty and morality,” 12ff. 648 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Kitāb al-faraj baʿda al-shidda [The Book of Joy after Sorrow], ed. Ḥasan ʿAbd al-ʿĀl (Ṭanṭā: Maktabat al-Ṣaḥāba, 1985). 649 Miller, “Strategies of representation,” 209-54. 650 Ibid., 221. 651 Ibid., 228-230.

200 collections, however, the hyper-icon, the Islamic piety in our context, is shaped and impacted by the differences between the individual subjects. A pre-Islamic Christian saint, because of this very difference in the religious background of the hero (placed among

Muslim saints), renders Islamic asceticism timeless and ecumenical.

The Wajal has been identified in scholarship as pseudepigraphy. Yet, this identification limits our understanding of hagiographical authorship in antiquity. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā might have not consulted any text and might have written the Wajal with his broad knowledge of Christian asceticism and St. Antony’s dossier. This renders him a hagiographer of St. Antony nonetheless. As shown in the introduction, hagiographers used multiple rhetorical tools to authenticate their writings, such as claims of meeting their hagiographical subjects in person, speaking with eye witnesses, or transmitting from authoritative texts. Similarly, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā might have created a memory of St. Antony faithful to the latter’s hagiographical dossier, with the claim of an authoritative source text.

This would still render him a Muslim hagiographer of this renowned Christian saint who exhorted on perseverance in faith.

3.2. South Arabian historiography and Dhū al-Qarnayn the Believing King

Ibn Hishām (d. 833), primarily known as the editor of Ibn Isḥāq’s Life of Muhammad, is also the author of a local history of south Arabia, titled Kitāb al-tījān fī-mulūk ḥimyar.652

In the majority of the book Ibn Hishām quotes the aforementioned Yemeni transmitter

652 Ibn Hishām, Kitāb al-tījān fī-mulūk himyar [The Book of Crowns on the Kings of Himyar] (Haydarabad, 1928); Watt, “Ibn His̲ h̲ ām,” in EI2; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 5-7, 141-42. For an edition of a variant codex (London Or. 2424), with a brief introductory commentary, see Mark Lidzbarski, “Zu den arabischen Alexandergeschichten,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete: Fachzeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (1886): 263-312.

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Wahb b. Munabbih, and in fact the Tījān is argued to have partially preserved Wahb’s lost book Kitāb al-mulūk al-mutawwaja.653 The Tījān documents south Arabian antiquities through a regal genealogical history, and it presents peripheral pre-Islamic narratives woven into an Islamic time frame. The example I will focus on here is the south Arabian king identified as Dhū al-Qarnayn (the Two-horned), and the relation between this character and the Alexander Legend. As seen in the previous chapter, the Dhū al-Qarnayn mentioned in the Qur’ān is often identified as Alexander the Great in the Islamic tradition.

In the Tījān, however, the epithet “Two-horned” is attributed to a believing king of south

Arabia, whose depiction was greatly shaped by the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend, embedded in an Islamic theological frame. This case study is a close look at the intricate relationship between transmission of stories and of tropes across religious traditions.

In the Tījān, following an account of the Creation and the prophetic genealogy, Ibn

Hishām gives the succession of Himyarite kings as descendants of the prophet Hūd, descendant of Shem, son of Noah. Ibn Hishām brings in the succession of the Himyarite kings with the mythical Wā’il b. Ḥimyar. He ends his account with the time of Sayf b. Dhī

Yazan (d. 578), who ended the Axumite (Ethiopian) rule over south Arabia with the help of the Sasanid king Khosrou I (d. 579).654 Ibn Hishām provides a number of hagiographical narratives in the Tījān within this genealogy. For example, one of them is the “story of the

653 Kitāb al-mulūk al-mutawwaja min Ḥimyar wa akhbārihim wa qiṣaṣihim wa qubūrihim wa ashʿārihim [The Book of the Crowned Kings of Himyar and Stories and Legends about Them and Their Tombs and and Their Poetry], in which Wahb is reported to have narrated the legendary foundation history and possibly the faḍāʾil of south Arabia. Khoury, Wahb, 1:205-206, 286-30; idem., “Wahb b. Munabbih,” EI2; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 140-1. 654 Robert Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 56-57.

202 fire which the Himyarites worshipped before they converted to Judaism.”655 It is a short narrative about two rabbis taking an ordeal by walking into a fire, which the people of

Yemen used to worship. The rabbis are not burned, since they hang holy writings around their necks. Upon this miracle, the people of Yemen are converted to Judaism, which is presented in the text as the precursor monotheism before the beginning of Christianity in the region. A few accounts later Ibn Hishām gives the story of Dhū Nuwās, whom he identifies as “the Companion of the Trench [singular of the qur’ānic aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd], whom God mentions in the Qur’ān.”656 But he only reports the Axumite intervention in south Arabia, and does not comment on the rest of the qur’ānic verses (Q85:4-7), or narrate the persecution of Christians, which is generally accepted to be alluded to in these verses.657

Thus, Ibn Hishām has a selective and limited use of hagiographical stories in the Tījān.

According to the genealogy given in the book, the tenth king of Himyar was al-

Ṣaʿab Dhū al-Qarnayn, son of the king al-Ḥārith b. al-Hamāl.658 Ibn Hishām begins his account of the reign of Dhū al-Qarnayn by reminding his genealogy descending from the prophet Noah. After this genealogical information, he gives a brief report from Wahb b.

Munabbih, in which Muhammad’s cousin and the fourth caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib praises reports of Himyarite origin for having valuable admonitions.659 Following the report, again

655 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 296. 656 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 301. 657 R. Paret, “Aṣḥāb al-Uk̲ h̲ dūd,” in EI2. I will extensively analyze the qur’ānic aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd in the next chapter. 658 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 81ff; a German translation is provided in Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 9- 27. 659 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 82. (qāla Wahb “rafaʿa al-ḥadīth ilā amīr al-mu’minīn ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib karamallāhu wajhihi innahu qāla ‘ḥadīth Ḥimyar fa-inna fī aḥadīthuhā ʿibran.’”)

203 on the account of Wahb, Ibn Hishām begins the narrative about Dhū al-Qarnayn with the latter’s dreams, followed by a relatively lengthy account of his reign and travels.660

Dhū al-Qarnayn sees dreams in four subsequent nights, which become gradually more vivid and powerful. The first night he dreams that he held great mountains in his hand; the second night he sees the sun in his right hand and the moon in his left hand; the third night he sees that he eats the mountains and drinks the seas of the world; and on the fourth night in his dream humans and jinn, beasts and birds, all the creatures sit between his two hands. The king then convenes the religious leaders in the community to ask them about the meaning of his dreams.661 A shaykh (master) among his confidants tells him that with the providence of God he will rule over the entire world, bringing justice to it, but that the one who can really explain the dreams is a prophet in Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem), born of Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm.662

Upon his conversation with the shaykh, the king convenes a great army of soldiers and leaves for Jerusalem. Before reaching Jerusalem, he visits Mecca. The king walks in al-balad al-ḥarām on foot and circumambulates al-bayt (the house, the Kaʿba).663 After his pilgrimage, he goes to Jerusalem and meets the prophet, who introduces himself as Mūsā al-Khiḍr b. Khiḍrūn b. ʿUmūm b. Yahūdhā b. Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm al-Khalīl.664

When the king narrates his dreams to the prophet, he affirms the interpretation of his

660 A space of 45 pages is allocated for him, while all of the other rulers of Himyar are given 6 pages at the most. 661 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 81-4. 662 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 84-5. 663 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 85. (intahā ilā al-balad al-ḥarām fa-nazala bihi wa-mashā fīl-ḥarām rājilan ḥāfiyan wa-ṭāf bil-bayt.) 664 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 85.

204 dreams, that he will rule the entire earth with obedience to and providence from God. Mūsā al-Khiḍr continues to exhort Dhū al-Qarnayn on how he will conquer east and west, from

Jazīra to al-Andalus, with the sword of God, inviting people to the religion of Abraham.665

The narrative describes the king’s travels to Persia, Armenia, and other places, and his encounters with their people, their wondrous buildings, and creatures, including the barbaric and unsightly Gog and Magog.666 At this point in the text, Ibn Hishām himself narrates the building of the wall between Gog and Magog and the people, without citing any transmitter as a source.667 Then, he says, Dhū al-Qarnayn died in Iraq after which al-

Khiḍr disappeared, who had not appeared to anybody other than the prophet Moses before.668 The account on Dhū al-Qarnayn ends with an elegy and other epic poetry written for the king.

The Tījan, the Alexander Legend, and the Qur’ān

Dhū al-Qarnayn is never referred to as Alexander in the text, but the narrative uses numerous tropes from the Alexander dossier.669 The dialogue between him and the prophet in Jerusalem is reminiscent of Alexander’s consulting the wise sage about the future in the

Syriac Legend.670 Al-Khiḍr’s finding of the Water of Life, prophesying Alexander’s defeat

665 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 92. 666 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 100. 667 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 102-3. 668 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 108-9. 669 Tropes from the Alexander Romance was used in numerous texts in Arabic literature, but they are often used to describe the character and exploits of other heroes, such as Companions or Muslim commanders. Norris, “Fables and Legends,” 138-39. In the Tījān, the king is also referred to as the Two-horned, Alexander’s epithet. 670 Budge, “Syriac History of Alexander,” 126-7; idem., “Discourse of Jacob of Serugh,” 171.

205 of Gog and Magog and building the wall, and his reign upon the entire earth from east to west, are among the prominent tropes from the Alexander Legend repeated in the Tījān.671

Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem, too, echoes with a passage in the Christian Syriac Alexander

Legend, in which Alexander makes a supplication to God that he will place his throne in

Jerusalem, so that “when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon [his] kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts forever.”672 Dhū al-Qarnayn is not referred to as Christian or

Muslim in the Tījān, but he is portrayed as fighting for the religion of Abraham.

One of the interesting details in the account is the encounter between Dhū al-

Qarnayn and a prophet who is named Mūsā al-Khiḍr. The Moses mentioned here is a descendant of Abraham, but not the prophet Moses, son of Amram. The conflation of

Moses and al-Khiḍr in the Tījān reminds us the qur’ānic story in sūrat al-kahf Q18:60-82, where Moses, the unnamed servant of God (identified as al-Khiḍr in the exegetical tradition) and Dhū al-Qarnayn are narrated together. Possibly aware of this qur’ānic conflation, the Tījān introduces another prophet Moses who was al-Khiḍr, and not the

Moses son of Amram, and this other Moses lived in the time of the king Dhū al-Qarnayn.673

This presentation is greatly confusing, yet it is resolved at the end of the story in the Tījān:

The prophet Moses son of Amram and al-Khiḍr are separated, for Moses al-Khiḍr is reported to have appeared to the prophet Moses.674 This is a great example of a tradition

671 For an overview of the repeating themes, see Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 141, 150-188, et passim. 672 Budge, “Christian Legend,” 146. Note that the king’s journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and meeting the prophet reminds one of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and seeing the prophets, the instance known as the isrā’ and miʿrāj in the Islamic tradition. For some versions of it, see Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 181-7. 673 Q18:59-100. 674 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 108-9. (thumma ghāb al-khiḍr fa-lam yaẓhuru ilā aḥadin baʿdihi illa ilā mūsā bin ʿamrān al-nabī)

206 conflating biblical narratives, the Alexander Legend, and stories of other mythical heroes.

Before commenting further on the Tījān and its utilization of the late antique Alexander

Legend, we will bring in another related text.

In the edition of the Haydarabad manuscript, the Tījān is followed by the Akhbār of ʿUbayd b. Sharya, a semi-historical sage and storyteller, who is reported to have worked at caliph Muʿāwiya’s court (r. 639-661).675 The text is entitled “Reports about Yemen, its poetic works, and genealogy.”676 Despite the seemingly chronological organization, this text mostly presents ancient prophets and saints as rulers of Himyar in a highly hagiographical language embellished with lengthy poetry, in the frame of a dialogue taking place between ʿUbayd and the caliph Muʿāwiya.677 There has been some contemporary scholarship on the relationship between the Tījān of Ibn Hishām and the Akhbār of ʿUbayd.

Fritz Krenkow argues that the Akhbār was authored by Ibn Isḥāq, edited by Ibn Hishām, and transmitted by the latter’s student al-Barqī (d. 863). 678 Nabia Abbott argues for

ʿUbayd’s authorship of the Akhbār, and explains his absence among the biographies of

675 ʿUbayd b. Sharya, Akhbār ʿubayd b. sharya al-jurhumī fī-akhbār al-yaman wa-ashʿāriha wa- ansābiha (Haydarabad, 1928), 311-489; Franz Rosenthal, “Ibn Sharya,” in EI2; Dodge, Fihrist, I: 194; Elise W. Crosby, The History, Poetry and Genealogy of the Yemen: The Akhbar of Abid b. Sharya al-Jurhumi (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007). He might be south Arabian, or an Iraqi scholar who acquired extensive information on south Arabian antiquities. The Haydarabad edition is dated to 1347AH/1928CE. 676 Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 311. 677 The literary form of dialogue, especially between a caliph and an ascetic, was a popular trope in medieval Christian and Muslim literature. For question-and-answer literature, see the Introduction above. 678 Crosby, History, Poetry and Genealogy, 12. Fritz Krenkow, “The two oldest books on Arabic folklore,” Islamic Culture 2 (1928): 234-36; Watt, “Ibn His̲ h̲ ām,” EI2. Skepticism on this matter was also raised by Franz Rosenthal, “Ibn Sharya,” in EI2. Also see Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 142-6.

207 traditionists with the fact that he did not transmit traditions from Muhammad.679 As Crosby underlines following Abbott, there is no substantial reason to dismiss the authenticity of

Akhbār under ʿUbayd’s authorship. There is, however, a substantial temporal gap between him and the transmitter of his work, al-Barqī. 680 Abbott proposes that the Egyptian traditionist and reporter Asad b. Mūsā (d. 827), a teacher of both Ibn Hishām and al-Barqī, might have transmitted ʿUbayd’s work.681

Regardless of the issues of authorship, the manuscript traditions demonstrate the overlapping transmission histories for these two texts, the Tījān and the Akhbār. The two works about the glorious history of Yemen were treated as a unified entity serving the same purpose, namely, aggrandizing the south Arabian antiquities and sanctity, albeit in varying structures and literary styles (the Akhbār has a more intensive use of poetry). The placement of the Akhbār immediately following the Tījān, at least in one manuscript, adds another hagiographical layer to the presentation of the history of south Arabia; the Akhbār re-emphasizes the sanctity of south Arabia with a number of stories of prophets and saints related to that region. One of these stories is of Dhū al-Qarnayn.

Like the rest of the narratives reported by ʿUbayd in this text, the story of Dhū al-

Qarnayn is in the form of a dialogue between ʿUbayd and the caliph Muʿāwiya. ʿUbayd says that the south Arabian king Dhū al-Qarnayn is the very Dhū al-Qarnayn mentioned in

679 Nabia Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), 1:10ff. 680 Crosby, History, Poetry and Genealogy, 13. 681 Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, 10ff. For Asad b. Mūsā’s transmission of Ibn Hishām’s work, see R. G. Khoury, “Asad b. Mūsā b. Ibrāhīm,” in EI2; idem., Asab b. Mūsā: Kitāb al-zuhd [The Book of Asceticism] (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 21-38.

208 the Qur’ān, and was a great, knowledgeable, and wise king.682 Then, ʿUbayd narrates Dhū al-Qarnayn’s travels to find the Water of Life, a search in which “al-Khiḍr succeeded before him.”683 The king died before reaching this land, and was buried by his companions, and his son lamented that he could not carry his body back to Yemen for burial. Upon

Muʿāwiya’s question, ʿUbayd says he reigned for 153 years, and that he heard some people from Himyar saying that he was buried in Yemen.684

The Tījān, together with the Akhbār, claims that the qur’ānic Dhū al-Qarnayn was a south Arabian king, not Alexander the Great. This representation appears to be a result of the redaction process after Wahb b. Munabbih, since in many exegetical reports transmitted on his authority, Wahb is quoted as giving information about the possible connections of Dhū al-Qarnayn traditions and Alexander the Great.685 In the Tījān, his account is intriguingly silent about any mentioning of Alexander. Moreover, Ibn Hishām himself, in the Sīra, notes that the name of the Dhū al-Qarnayn mentioned in the Qur’ān was Alexander, that he built Alexandria and it was named after him.686 Thus, lack of any mention of Alexander in this lengthy narrative in the Tījān appears to be an intentional omission. As a result of this silencing, the south Arabian king Dhū al-Qarnayn is depicted through the hagiographical tropes of the Christian Alexander Legend, while the persona of

Alexander the Great is erased from the memory attributed to the epithet Dhū al-Qarnayn.

682 Crosby, History, Poetry and Genealogy, 28-29; ʿUbayd b. Sharya, Akhbār, 433 . 683 ʿUbayd b. Sharya, Akhbār, 433. 684 ʿUbayd b. Sharya, Akhbār, 435. 685 Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 28. For Wahb’s accounts of Alexander, also see Southgate, Iskandarnāmah, 196-201. 686 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 719 fn. 186. He might also have copied what Ibn Isḥāq wrote, but according to Guillaume’s assessment, this note was added by Ibn Hishām.

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This example brings a new understanding to the use of tropes and topoi in ancient literature.

In certain cases, a transmitted story was stripped off of its heroes for reorienting purposes, and what is left of the story is often identified as a floating literary trope pulled out of a shared reservoir of tropes by the modern historian.

In Dhū al-Qarnayn’s representation in the Akhbār, the Qur’ān is used as a tool of legitimacy for the character (This is the Two-horned mentioned in the Qur’ān). Yet, the author does not intend to elucidate the qur’ānic character or the passages of concern. The

Akhbār does not function as exegesis but assumes the readers’ knowledge of the qur’ānic story. Thus, the Two-horned king, the holiness of whom is emphasized through both his connection to the qur’ānic time frame, and his depiction in familiar Alexandrian hagiographical tropes, participates in the presentation and praise of the sanctity of south

Arabia. Let us turn to the social context of the production of these two texts to have a better grasp of this reorientation.

Ibn Hishām, the Tījān, and the Alexander material

Ibn Hishām was born in Egypt and spent the majority of his life there.687 His shaykh Asad b. Mūsā, from whom he extensively transmitted reports, was also possibly an Egyptian of

Umayyad descent.688 He might be the transmitter of the material in the Tījān between Wahb b. Munabbih and Ibn Hishām,689 although there are no textual traces of such transmission history in the Tījān. Ibn Hishām’s family was from Basra, and traditionally known to be of

687 Watt, “Ibn His̲ h̲ ām,” EI2. 688 Khoury, “Asad b. Mūsā b. Ibrāhīm,” EI2; idem., Kitāb al-zuhd, 21-38. For scholarly connections and relations between south Arabia and Egypt, see Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 77- 91. 689 Khoury, “Asad b. Mūsā b. Ibrāhīm,” EI2.

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Yemeni descent. His connection to Iraq was not only familial, for he himself traveled to

Iraq, where he learned about the Sīra of Muhammad.690 Thus, the authorship of the Tījān, and possibly the editorial process of the Akhbār, places Ibn Hishām among both Egyptian and Basran genealogy of scholars with an interest in south Arabian antiquities.

Following the Persian-Byzantine wars in the sixth century, many Christian (mostly

Nestorian) families from Iraq were resettled in south Arabia.691 This was, however, not a one-time and one-direction demographic movement. Communities continued to resettle from Iraq to south Arabia in the following centuries, while south Arabian families moved to Iraq, like that of Ibn Hishām. These demographic shifts constituted the background of a branch of Islamic historiography that connects south Arabian and Iraqi traditions. Among the forerunners of south Arabian historiography are Wahb b. Munabbih and ʿUbayd b.

Sharya. It is worth spending some time on these two figures here, for Ibn Hishām extensively quotes Wahb in the Tījān, and likely knew and edited ʿUbayd’s work.

Wahb was the renowned Yemeni transmitter and jurist of Persian descent in the early eighth century.692 He was a first-generation Muslim. According to the biographical information preserved in the Islamic tradition, his father Munabbih was sent to Yemen from Khurasan during the reign of Chosroes Anushirvan (r. 531-579) and converted to

Islam. Wahb served as a judge and had access to courtly libraries, particularly in south

Arabia and Egypt. He is also reported to have had access to monastic libraries, where he

690 Watt, “Ibn His̲ h̲ ām,” EI2. 691 For history of Christianity in south Arabia in late antiquity, refer to fn. 500 above. 692 On Wahb b. Munabbih, see Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih,” EI2; idem., Wahb B. Munabbih; Abd al-Aziz Duri, “The beginnings of historical folklore: Wahb ibn Munabbih,” in The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, ed. and trans. Lawrance Conrad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 122-35.

211 possibly gathered great part of his knowledge on pre-Islamic religions and traditions.693

The vast number of books that he read has been an essential aspect of his hagiographical representation.694 Moreover, many “books” are attributed to him on the history of south

Arabia, although his works are only preserved as quotations in later works, and it is not clear whether he himself penned the “books” or mostly narrated the material. Wahb’s significance lies in being ostensibly the starting point of a long-standing Yemeni historiography dedicated to the elucidation of Yemeni heritage, sanctity, particularity, and importance. Although he was criticized and even dismissed by some later scholars for transmitting unreliable Christian and Jewish material, his authority on the antiquities of south Arabia remained, rivaled only by a few, one of which was ʿUbayd b. Sharya.

ʿUbayd’s connection to south Arabia is less clear compared to Wahb’s. In the ninth century his image as a sage knowledgeable in south Arabian history was solidified.695

Despite the expressed skepticism towards his existence and reliability, he was quoted as an authority on south Arabian antiquities. One of the scholars who transmitted works attributed to him was Ibn Hishām’s pupil al-Barqī, who might have transmitted ʿUbayd’s

Akhbār.696 Wahb and ʿUbayd’s works were significant milestones in the genealogy of scholars of south Arabian history and heritage. Ibn Hishām, by extensively quoting from them, placed himself in this strain of scholarship.697

693 Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 177. 694 Duri, “Beginnings of historical folklore,” 124. 695 Rosenthal, “Ibn S̲ h̲ arya,” EI2. 696 ʿUbayd b. Sharya, Akhbār, 312. 697 For an overview of south Arabian scholarship and literature, see A. El-Shami and R. B. Serjeant, “Regional scholarship: The Yemen,” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, eds. Ashtiany et al., 442-68, esp. 452-4.

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Why praise south Arabia? Ibn Hishām’s Yemeni descent could explain his investment in a text about the antiquities of south Arabia. But his allegiance to that tradition and place needs further elaboration. For Ibn Hishām, south Arabia was not simply an ancestral homeland to be nostalgically praised. He was also carving a scholarly identity for himself, and his studies connected him to the circles in Egypt and Iraq. Praising south

Arabian history and sanctity in these regions came with its own political connotations.

Especially in Iraq, where there is a deep-rooted tradition of ḥadīth criticism, writing about the sanctity and knowledge attributed to south Arabia likely directly participated in competitions between scholarly traditions, on which more below. Through Ibn Hishām’s example, a prominent author/editor with familial and scholarly connections to multiple regions, we see how complicated the discussions on allegiances and loyalties can be. Zayde

Antrim discusses that the concept of waṭan (lit. homeland) denoted religious and political attachment to territory in medieval Islamic literature, other than the more basic connotations of the term, like ancestral home, birthplace, or residence. 698 Tījān is a reification of such understanding of belonging.

Going back to stories: Finbarr Barry Flood’s conceptualization of center-periphery, and the exchange of material between the two as a form of negotiation of power and authority, is useful in our discussion of the story of the Two-horned king of south Arabia.699

Flood points out the networks (instead of territories) of exchange through which objects were transferred, which catalyzed conversation between locations and enabled

698 Zayde Antrim, “Waṭan and waṭaniyya: Loyalty to land in Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria,” al- Masaq 22, no. 2 (2010): 173-4. 699 Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 9-11, 17-26.

213 transculturation. Hanaoka, following Flood, emphasizes the role of humans in this dynamic, multidirectional relationship.700 My analysis, along the same lines, points out that legendary personas and stories were also important exchange objects in these networks, as catalysts of conversations on identity, authority, and power.

Saints as excellences

Both the Tījān and the Akhbār present pre-Islamic rulers of Yemen in saintly terms, as excellences of the region. As Hanaoka points out for Persian historiography, on the one hand, medieval historians elucidated the particular features of local saints to establish specificity and locality; on the other hand, they connected these local histories and stories to the center, and to the overarching currencies of their time. Ibn Hishām, by connecting south Arabian history to a qur’ānic time frame, made his intention explicit: Dhū al-

Qarnayn, the one mentioned in the Qur’ān, was a God-chosen believing king of south

Arabia. It is worth noting that Ibn Hishām’s note in the Sīra about caliph ʿUmar b.

Khaṭṭāb’s veneration of the tomb of the martyrs in south Arabia is also a perfect example to this strategy.701 Veneration of a Yemeni saint by a Qurashī figure is an important negotiation of the locale of sanctity.

Writing about the saintly past of Yemen, and embedding it in a qur’ānic framework, is a conversation with the Abbasid capital Baghdad. At a time when the descendants of

Muhammad’s uncle ʿAbbās solidified their power at the administrative center of the

Islamic empire, the Tījān, a peripheral historiography, claimed centrality of its subject’s

700 Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 32. 701 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 18.

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(south Arabia’s) participation in qur’ānic chronology.702 As Khoury states, Ibn Hishām wanted to connect Yemen to the biblical world, as presented at the beginning of his work,

“with a view to enhancing the worth of [Yemen] to the bosom of Islam, to Meccan and then to North Arabian roots, and to the center of rivalries which had built up between north and south.”703 In the form of a regal chronicle, it explained to its audiences how the current socio-political and religious character of south Arabia took shape. Alexander as a monotheistic and missionary king, in the process, was transmitted and presented as a merit of south Arabia.

Historians of south Arabia participated in the perennial practice of praising cities in antiquity. The Greek literary genres of panegyric, encomion, and ekphrasis, and the oratorical practice of praise continued through Christianity in late antiquity. 704

Hagiography was often used to promote local bishoprics and cities, since saintly past and apostolic succession were highly-valued social currencies in late antiquity. The apostolic

702 For the rivalry between the “north” and the “south,” emblematic of the rivalry between the emigrants (muhājirūn) from Mecca and the helpers (anṣār) in Medina, between the Qurayhs and the tribes in the south, see Watt, “Materials used by Ibn Isḥāq,” 26. Note that in the ḥadīth collection of Yemeni Hammām b. Munabbih, Muhammad is reported to have said he would choose the anṣār over all other people. Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih, 127 (§56). 703 Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih,” EI2. 704 Among the foundational scholarly works on praise literature and its relation to hagiography are: Theodore Chalon Burgess, Epideictic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902); Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); David Brakke, Athanasius and Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004); Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Helene Basu, “Praise and social constructions of identity: The Bards of north-west India,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 130 (2005): 81–105; Vassiliki Limberis, Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

215 legacy of Christianity at a particular place was a major source of local pride and legitimacy, and this gave great impetus to hagiographical production at certain locations. For example, late antique stories of the Edessan martyrs,705 the Teaching of Addai (with the story of a painting of Jesus by the scribe Hannan),706 and the Acts of Māri707 reveal the Edessan literati’s attempt to promote the city with an emphasis on its apostolic succession. The

Islamic faḍā’il literature, particularly the works dedicated to merits of cities and provinces, can be construed as a continuation of this ancient tradition as a form of genos epideiktikon, operating in an Islamic semiotic system.

Faḍā’il literature presents the excellences and merits of people, communities, cities, and other things “for the purposes of a laudatio.”708 Although praising tribes and glorious deeds of heroes was an ancient tradition in pre-Islamic Arabia, Islamic faḍā’il literature, technically speaking, originated with the excellences of the Qur’ān, of

Muhammad, his Companions, and the Successors. As the genre developed, it thematically included tribes, religious communities, religious practices, and towns and cities. Some examples to the latter are Kitāb faḍā’il miṣr of ʿUmar b. Muḥammad al-Kindī (d. ca.961), al-Rabaʿī’s (d. 1052) Kitāb faḍā’il al-shām wa-dimashq, and Faḍā’il al-kūfa. Local

705 Francis Crowford Burkitt, Acts of the Edessan Martyrs Guria, Shmona and Habib, and the Story of Their Deliverance of Euphemia (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007). 706 George Howard, The Teaching of Addai (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981). On the Mandylion, the piece of cloth supposedly retaining an image of Jesus’ face, see Averil Cameron, “The history of the image of Edessa: The telling of a story,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 7, Okeanos: Essays presented to Ihor Ševčenko on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students (1983): 80-94. 707 Amir Harrak, intr. and trans., Acts of Mār Māri the Apostle (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005). 708 R. Sellheim, “Faḍīla,” in EI2. The term is often used together and/or interchangeably with manāqib (glorious exploits) and maḥāsin (excellences) in Islamic hagiographical literature. Here I do not make a distinction between these terms. For hagiography as praise of saints, see Efthymiadis and Deroche, “Greek hagiography,” 36-40; Khalek, Damascus, 135-140.

216 historical writings that emphasize the sanctity and other merits of cities and regions are numerous, and often saints from pre-Islamic as well as the Islamic era are presented as part of the rich heritage of a town or region in these works.

Faḍā’il literature often includes descriptions and prescriptions of popular belief through hagiographical anecdotes.709 Hanaoka argues that non-Arab communities of the peripheries often created and developed new Muslim identities. The portrayal of a sacred past and its importance for and relevance to current Islamic politics and culture were important literary tools to establish new identities. She argues that in the formation processes of these new identities, peripheral histories engaged in a discourse of authority and legitimacy with the center. 710 A significant component of this discourse was the excellences or merits of these places. Some places, she demonstrates, were associated with

Muhammad (appearing in someone’s dream, for instance), some had a role in eschatology, and others were associated with a certain Companion who taught ḥadīth there.711 The sanctity of a place, however, was not claimed merely through its Islamic past.

Pre-Islamic saints were often considered among the faḍā’il of a place, for they ensured the presence of “a form of Islam” before Islam at that region, and therefore, enabled claims to sanctity, venerability and thus, legitimacy.712 Khalek demonstrates the

709 Ghalin Anabsi, “Popular beliefs as reflected in ‘Merits of Palestine and Syria’ (faḍā’il al- shām) literature: Pilgrimage ceremonies and customs in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods,” Journal of Islamic Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 59-70. 710 Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 4. For the same phenomenon in Latin Christianity see Lars Boje Mortensen, ed., The Making of Christian Myths in the Periphery of Latin Christendom (c. 1000-1300) (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2006). 711 Ibid., 5-6 712 For Islamic perspective on monotheism before Islam, W. Montgomery Watt, “Ḥanīf,” in EI2.

217 intricate relationship between the biblical past and faḍā’il literature. 713 Hanaoka also demonstrates how the local pre-Islamic Iranian past was weaved into its Islamic present. I will fully quote the latter here: “One way of accommodating the pre-Islamic past with the

Islamic present was to compress, overlay, and rearrange chronologies or identities in a linear or quasi-linear fashion. […] such mechanisms allow for pre-Islamic Persian piety to be transferred into the Islamic period within a new framework. These texts articulate, in their locally differentiated ways, Persian-Islamic identities that were simultaneously deeply local and Muslim.”714 The Tījān and the Akhbār exemplify this phenomenon by integrating

Dhū al-Qarnayn – Alexander into the historiography of another peripheral region, namely, south Arabia. The Two-horned king is depicted as the Christian Alexander the Great, but rules south Arabia, and is embedded in the Islamic time frame, since he is said to be mentioned in the Qur’ān and depicted as making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Technically the

Tījān and Akhbār are not faḍā’il works. Nevertheless, their presentations of the pre-Islamic past of south Arabia and the sanctity of its rulers are very much an epideictic literary practice. The use of Christian hagiographical knowledge for this purpose significantly contributes to our understanding of encomiastic reorientation of Christian hagiographical knowledge in Islam.

713 Khalek, Damascus, 87, 139, 154ff. 714 Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 64-65.

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3.3. St. George as a Muslim in al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh al-rusul wal-mulūk

It is of great importance to recapitulate the representation of St. George Megalomartyros in the Tārīkh al-rusul wal-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), a well-known narrative in scholarship, 715 since it exemplifies a prominent function of Christian hagiography in

Islamic literature. According to al-Ṭabarī’s account, transmitted on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih and “other learned men,” Jirjīs (George) “was a righteous servant of God among the people of Palestine.”716 He belonged to the remnants of the Companions of

Jesus, during the days of Dadhāna (possibly referring to the emperor Decius, r. 249-51), the king of Syria. George was a trader who gained much wealth and gave it all to charity.

Like many other believers of his time, he concealed his faith due to severe persecutions.

The king forced everybody to worship Afalūn (Apollo), and whoever did not comply was tortured.717 Seeing this, George was disturbed greatly and got into a dispute with the king.718 Enraged by his answers, the king started torturing George, but was not able to kill him.719 He was put in a prison where an angel comforted him, heralding him that he will be killed four times in the coming years, and only in the last one God will accept his soul.

Indeed, the king tortured him severely, seemingly killing him each time, and every time

George came back to life. The fourth time, however, God granted him martyrdom, and annihilated the city with fire.720

715 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:24-36; Moshe Perlmann, trans., The History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:173-186; B. Carra de Vaux, “D̲ j̲ ird̲ j̲ īs,” in EI2; L. Cheikho, “Athar jadīd li-aʿmal al-qiddīs jirjīs al-shahīd,” al- Mashriq (1907): 414-420. 716 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:24; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:173. 717 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2: 24-25; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:174. 718 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:25-26; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:175. 719 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:26-32; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:176-80. 720 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:35-36; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:181-86.

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This storyline closely follows some Christian versions of the story of St. George

Megalomartyros. 721 In fact, there are significant parallels in the emplotment and vocabulary between al-Ṭabarī’s text and the Syriac recension of the story. For example, the king’s name that appears as Dadyanā722 in the Syriac is Dadhāna in the Arabic version. His tortures awaiting those who did not worship the deity Apollo is emphasized in both traditions. George’s dispute with the king is longer in the Syriac text, but the outlines of the conversation are similar; in both dialogues, George contrasts a vain pagan symbol with the truthful God. In al-Ṭabarī’s text he first speaks to the king thus:

“Know, that you are a slave owned by a master, and that you yourself own nothing directly or indirectly, and that above you is a Lord Who owns you and others. This Lord created and sustained you; he makes you live and die; he harms you and benefits you; and yet you propose to imitate what is created by Him? God said unto man ‘Be.’ And he was. Deaf, dumb, speechless and sightless, [an idol] can nether hurt nor benefit. It cannot help you at all to dispense with God. You decorate it with gold and silver and make it a temptation unto man. You worship it, not God, and you force humans to worship it. You call it the Lord.”723

721 A recent overview of the scholarship on St. George in the Western Christian tradition is in Samantha Riches, St. George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing, 2000); idem., St. George: A Saint for All (London: Reaktion Books, 2015); also see Jerry Brotton, “St. George Between East and West,” in Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 50–65. For an analysis of the Greek text, see L. Casson and E. L. Hettich, eds., Excavations at Nessana (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:123-142. For the Syriac, see E. W. Brooks, “Acts of Saint George,” Le Muséon 38 (1925): 67-115. For the Latin, see F. Cumont, “La plus ancienne légende de St. Georges,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 114 (1936): 5-51. For the Coptic and Ethiopic, see Ernest W. Budge, ed. and trans., The Martyrdom and Miracles of Saint George of Cappadocia (London, 1888); idem., St. George of Lydda, The Patron Saint of England: A Study of the Cultus of St. George in Ethiopia (London: Luzac, 1930). 722 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 97. 723 Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:174-5.

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In the Syriac text, George’s first speech to the king is shorter, and it emphasizes the

Christian doctrine more than the omnipotence of God, which is prominent in the Islamic version. Despite the differences, both of the passages underline the king’s pettiness, the impotence of the idols, and the greatness of the one God:

“I am a Christian; but your threats, king, are idle, and name not those who are not gods; but let gods who did not make heaven and earth perish from the earth. For I worship one true God, with his Son and his Holy Spirit, one Trinity and one Godhead without division.”724

The tortures of the king are also narrated with similar tropes between the Syriac and the Arabic versions: tying him up to a piece of wood and skinning him725 (putting vinegar and mustard on his flesh in the Arabic); piercing his body with knives and nails726

(piercing his head in the Arabic); and putting him in an unused pit727 (putting him in a hot copper cauldron in the Arabic).728 God’s promise of resurrecting him three times is a significant dramatic vision in both of the versions, although in the Syriac text each of the deaths is narrated with more extensive detail. George’s prayer to accept his intercession for believers that were to come after him in the Arabic version is shorter than the prayer in the

Syriac, but very similar in content:

“O God, you have honored me with this tribulation, to grant me the virtues of the martyrs. O God, this is my last day, the day which you have promised me would be a rest from this world’s tribulation. O God, I ask you not to accept my soul, and not to remove me from this place before you bring upon the arrogant people your blows and vengeance which they cannot withstand. This would console me and

724 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 98-9. 725 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 99. 726 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 99, 102. 727 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 100. 728 For a comparison of motifs between various western Christian traditions of George, see Riches, Hero, Martyrs and Myth, 219.

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delight me, for they have mistreated and tortured me. O God, I also ask of you that, if after me any herald of yours should, amidst tribulation and grief, remember me and ask you [something] in my name, you should comfort him, have mercy on him, be responsive to him, and accept my intersession for him.”729

In Syriac, this prayer and petition are as follows:

“Lord God, hear me because many are standing and seeking to take my body, and my body and bones are not sufficient for all the world, Lord God, grant me this petition that whoever shall be in torture or in fear or have a terrifying dream and remember my name shall have what is good, and evil hateful visions shall depart from him. Lord God, grant to my name and my bones that everyone who shall be engaged in a dangerous law-suit and remembers me shall come out of his suit without danger and without harm. Lord my God, grant me this favor, when clouds are gathered together, and men remember me in that country there shall not be there burning heat or hail. Lord God, bestow on me this favor that, whoever shall make mention of George or make an oblation and remember the day of his contest, there shall not be in his house one that is leprous, nor shall a stammered and a blind man be born in it, nor one that is palsied and one that is blind [sic.], nor one that is driven by a demon; mention not their sins, because thou art a merciful God, and they are flesh and blood and have mercy on them on my name’s sake.”730

Note that the Syriac prayer gives a long list of the situations and contexts in which George’s name and his bones (that is, his remembrance and relics) can help the believer, which is a prescription of liturgical remembrance and relic veneration; whereas, in the Islamic version of the prayer George’s suffering and intercession on behalf of the believers are reiterated in broader terms, without indicating or prescribing any ritual practice.

God’s wrath upon and destruction of the city after George’s prayer are also parallel between the two versions:

729 Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:186. 730 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 113-4.

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Then God granted him the fourth death, as promised. When the city and all within it was burnt down and turned to ashes, God carried it from the face of the earth. He overturned it, and for a long time thereafter malodorous smoke issued from under it. Anybody who inhaled it fell gravely ill. It resulted in a variety of diseases, each unlike the other.731

In comparison, in the Syriac text the author says:

And the same hour lightning came down from heaven like fire, and devoured the seventy kings, and not one of them escaped […] And in that same great contest many perished, men and women without number from the terror of lightning; and everyone believed in the living God.732

At the very end of the Arabic text al-Ṭabarī says that together with George many other people were also martyred, and they “numbered 34000, including the king’s wife.”733 This is a summary of the episode in the Syriac version, in which the queen Alexandra’s conversion to Christianity and the subsequent martyrdom are narrated.734

The similarities between the Christian and the Islamic versions of the story are numerous. However, in al-Ṭabarī’s text George is given an Islamic character, as the compared passages demonstrate. To give a few further examples to the differences in discourse: George is defined as a “righteous servant of God,” and his only affiliation with

Christianity is that he is a member of the “remnants of Jesus’ followers.”735 The people persecuted by Decius are also called “believers,” and not as Christians. In fact, the only

731 Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:186. 732 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 114-5. 733 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:36. For a study of the numerology of al-Ṭabarī, see John Nawas, “The quest for historical reliability: A test of two hypotheses relating to the use of numbers in al- Ṭabarī’s History,” in Al-Ṭabarī, ed. Kennedy, 209-17. 734 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 111-12. 735 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:24.

223 time Christianity is mentioned in the rest of the story is during George’s first dialogue with

Decius, as he says to the king:

“Tell me, how would you compare Magnentius, a dignitary of your people, with Christ, the son of Mary? For God chose him and his mother above the men of the world, and made him a sign for the believers. […] How would you compare the mother of this good spirit, whom God has chosen as His word, cleansing her body for His spirit, and making her the head of His women servants? To whom would you compare her and the divine favor she was granted? To Jezebel?”736

This comparison appears as the following in the Syriac tradition, where George says to the king:

“Tell me the names of your gods since you said to me that Apollo stretched out the heaven, and Heracles planted the earth firmly, and Athena diffused the sunlight; but they made none of the things that are seen. Know therefore that it is not the gods who made creation, but they are futile images. […] Tell me, king: which seems to you worthier by comparison, Simon the chief of the apostles, or Poseidon the chief of brigands? Samuel the chosen prophet, or Actaeon the madman? […] Mary who gave birth to God in our manhood, or Jezebel the slayer of God’s prophets?”737

In the Islamic version, Mary is referred to as mother of Jesus, God’s word and spirit.

Her virginity and Jesus’ divine nature are silenced, although Mary’s virginity is known and praised in the Islamic tradition as early as the Qur’ān.738 Moreover, in the same dialogue in al-Ṭabarī’s account, George speaks thus: “God said unto man ‘be’ and he was. Deaf,

736 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:26; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:175; cf. I Kings 21; II Kings 9: 21- 37. 737 Brooks, “Acts of St. George,” 102-3. 738 Mary’s virgin birth and placement above all other women are mentioned in Q19:16-33, and Q3:35-42. For Mary in the Islamic tradition see Chapter 1, p. 85, esp. fn. 269.

224 dumb and speechless and sightless, [an idol] can neither hurt nor benefit.”739 Although in the Syriac version the idols are also called futile and deaf, the lines in the Islamic text are clear allusions to qur’ānic verses. The first one, “he said ‘be’ and he was,” is a qur’ānic expression seen in multiple sūras.740 The latter sentence similarly has qur’ānic undertones, since many verses define idols as “what can neither harm nor benefit.”741 The major difference between the dramatic finales of the Arabic and the Syriac versions is that in the former the destruction of the city and the people are narrated very vividly; whereas, in the

Syriac version the destruction led to many people’s awe and conversion to the Christian faith. Thus, George’s story ended similar to those of qur’ānic prophets. In addition to these changes in discourse, in the Tārīkh the story of George is placed in a genealogy of prophets, after the story of Samson, “rightly guided by God for his integrity,” a Muslim among his idol worshipper people, before the time of the Sasanid emperors.742 Through these and such strategies in representation, George is presented in the Tārīkh as a pre-Islamic Muslim holy man, a true believer of Jesus, and not as a Christian.

Representing Christians as Muslims

This representation exemplifies a perennial Islamic historiographical practice, namely, presenting pre-Islamic Christians as Muslims predating Muhammad.743 In this practice, the

739 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:25; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:174. 740 Q2:117; 3:47; 3:59; 6:73; 16:40; 19:35; 36:82; 40:68. 741 Q10:106; 22:12; 25:55. For an ignorant being “deaf, dumb and blind” see the verses Q2:18; 2:171. 742 Al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2:22; Perlmann, History of Al-Ṭabarī, 4:171. 743 For use of Christian hagiography in Islamic historiography, see Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 11; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 46-49; Rosenthal, “Influence of the biblical tradition,” 40-44. For al-Ṭabarī’s weaving of pre-Christian history into Islamic historical frame,

225 hero is situated within a pre-Islamic historical frame as a believer and defender of the one

God. Christian discourse is minimized, while the story is embellished with qur’ānic discourse. The hagiographical emplotment of the Christian story remains recognizable, but

George is now a member of the Muslim community, whose faith, status as a martyr (and the complete destruction of the disbelievers afterwards), and his intercessory power are emphasized, and tied into the qur’ānic salvation history.

Representing biblical prophets as precursors of Muhammad is a well-documented phenomenon, observed both in the Qur’ān and in post-qur’ānic literature. Islamic historiography was often a commemorative practice to create, articulate, revitalize, and sustain a primordial Islamic past that extends back to the Creation.744 Al-Ṭabarī was a participant of this tradition. Claude Gilliot extensively demonstrates in multiple works how his universal history functioned as a demonstration of Islamic salvation history.745 Through this practice, prophets were referred to as “muslims,” and depicted as participating in the

Islamic eschatological frame.

Jane Dammen McAuliffe states that al-Ṭabarī, like many historians before him, had an overarching assumption: Pre-Islamic prophets were signs and prototypes of

Muhammad, which surface as his two major works, Tafsīr and Tārīkh, “treat the prediction and annunciation of Muhammad.”746 The example of George points out the participation

see Whitby, “Period before Jesus,” 20-22. For an analysis of al-Yaʿqūbī’s (d. 897/8) extensive use of the Syriac Cave of Treasures in his Tārīkh, see Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 182-98. 744 Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 214ff. 745 Gilliot, Exégèse, Langue et Théologie en Islam; idem., “Récit, mythe et historie chez Tabari: une vision mythique de l’histoire universelle,” MIDEO 21 (1993): 277-89; idem., “al-Ṭabarī and the “history of salvation,” in Al-Ṭabarī, ed. Kennedy, 131-40. 746 Jane Dammen McAuliffe, “Al-Ṭabarī’s prelude to the Prophet,” in Al-Ṭabarī, ed. Kennedy, 113.

226 of Christian saints in the “Islamization” of Christians, alongside with major biblical prophets. McAuliffe focuses on the representation of prominent prophets, such as Jesus, as well as Abraham and Moses, to support her argument, but the representation seen in the

History of al-Ṭabarī was not restricted to prophets and included other saintly personas.

As Griffith states, “Muslim commentators neatly assign[ed] Jesus’ true disciples, and therefore the real Christians, to the nascent Muslim community [umma].”747 These

Christian holy men belonged to the Muslim community that began with Adam, and extending across generations through prophets and holy men, reached Muhammad and beyond.748 As a part of the “hermeneutic process whereby the early Muslim community sought to interpret bits and pieces of its recalled primordial past,” the memory of many

Christian saints, like those of prophets, were Islamicized.749 Their hagiographical dossiers were essential resources for this integration process, in which the saints’ specific sign value as Christian holy men were transformed and re-elaborated, and they were depicted as pious, ascetic believers of an almost amorphous monotheist religion which appears as proto-

Islam.750 Julia Bray refers to Christian holy men in such literary contexts as “partners of

Muslims” in history, a necessary part of God’s plan.751 Beyond being mere partners, some

Christians were depicted as members of the ever-existing Muslim community. They were

747 Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 30. See also Mourad, “Christians and Christianity,” 70-71. 748 The oft-cited qur’ānic verse in this context is Q22:78 “It is He who has named you Muslims, both before and in this (Revelation);” Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 8-11. 749 Sizgorich, “Become infidels,” 126. 750 Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 18. 751 Julia Bray, “Christian king, Muslim apostate: Depictions of Jabala ibn al-Ayham in early Arabic sources,” in Writing ‘True Stories’, 201.

227 described and likely perceived by Muslim communities as primordial Muslim holy men, servants of God prior to Muhammad.

A few words about agencies is fitting here. One should be weary of attributing an active agency to al-Ṭabarī. Representing Christians as Muslims was a deep-rooted historiographical practice in Islam. Since al-Ṭabarī was mostly a collector and editor of reports for his works, it is difficult to tell whether George’s representation as a Muslim was his active choice or merely his repetition of the older reports. He transmits the story on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih and “other learned men.”752 Ibn al-Nadīm reports that he learned “from the sons of the brother of Wahb.”753 But this is a very generic statement, not helpful in reconstructing a possible trajectory between Wahb and al-Ṭabarī for the story of

St. George. As Mohsen Zakeri, among others, emphasizes, al-Ṭabarī used a wide variety of sources for especially the pre-Islamic sections of his Tārīkh, the majority of which are obscure to modern historians. 754 For example, Zakeri shows the complex history of transmission of the Persian regal chronicle Khudāynāmah until it reached al-Ṭabarī. It is easy to imagine that similarly complex trajectories underlie his access to his other sources, through which stories like that of St. George found reiteration at his pen.

752 On Muslim authors’ reluctance to cite Jewish and Christian especially scriptural sources, see Michael Lecker, “The death of the Prophet Muḥammad’s father: Did Wāqidī invent some of the evidence?” ZDMG 145 (1995): 9-27; Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 32; McAuliffe, “Prelude to the Prophet,” 127-9. 753 Dodge, Fihrist, 1:564. 754 Mohsen Zakeri, “Al-Ṭabarī on Sasanian History: A Study in Sources,” in Al-Ṭabarī, ed. Kennedy, 27. For criticisms raised against al-Ṭabarī and other “traditionist” historians in the Middle Ages, see Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History: A Study in the the Philosophic Foundation of the Science of Culture (London: Goerge Allan and Unwin, 1957), 134-8.

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The other Islamic reiterations of the story of George point at multiple layers of transmission of the story within Islamic literature. For example, in the Meadows of Gold, al-Masʿūdī (tenth c.) gave a brief summary of the story of Jirjīs, with details differing from the account of al-Ṭabarī. In this retelling, George lived during the lifetime of some of the

Disciples of Jesus; he was sent to the king of Mosul, who burnt him and threw his ashes to the Tigris, after Jirjīs died and resurrected twice.755 There were multiple reiterations of the

Jirjīs story in Islamic literature on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih. Thus, it is difficult to assess to what extent al-Ṭabarī changed Wahb’s narrative, expanded it through the information he gathered from the “other learned men,” and therefore, how much of

George’s “Islamicization” is owed to him.

The Christian story and memory of St. George, through the representation of al-

Ṭabarī, became a story of a member of the Muslim umma in the Islamic imagination and memory. A martyrium is dedicated to St. George in Iraq in the Middle Ages, and he is referred to as a prophet in later Islamic literature.756 Such later representations testify to

George’s continuous image as a highly-venerated holy man in the Islamic tradition, an image which appears to have begun to take shape with the knowledge of Christian hagiographical traditions transmitted and reworked by early transmitters.

755 Sprenger, al-Masʿūdī’s Meadows of Gold, 128-9. 756 Abū’l Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Abī Bakr al-Harawī (d. 1215), Kitāb al-ishārāt ilā maʿrifat al-ziyārāt, ed. Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Damascus, 1953), 69. For the previous Christian church that had been on this site, see J. M. Fiey, Mossoul chrétienne: essai sur l’histoire, l’archéologie et l’état actuel des monuments chrétiens de la ville de Mossoul (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1959), 118-20; Josef Meri, trans., A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage: ʿAlī ibn Abī Bakr al-Harawī’s Kitāb al-Ishārāt ilā Maʿrifat al-Ziyārāt (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2004), 178.

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3.4. Looking at buildings, narrating St. Marūthā: Hagiography as etiology in local historiography

We move from universal to local historiography for the last function of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature and focus on Ibn al-Azraq’s (d. 1176) use of the Syriac

Life of Marūthā, bishop of Maypherqat (Martyropolis, Mayyāfāriqīn in Asia Minor) between ca.399-410, in his Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn.757 The extant section of the work narrates the Islamic history of the Jazira in annalistic form until the twelfth century. After giving an account of the Islamic conquest of Syria and the Jazira, and the eventual fall of the city of Maypherqat during the caliphate of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 644), Ibn al-Azraq introduces his work and starts narrating the foundation of the city. It is in this section that he places a summary of the Life of Marūthā.758 He transmits what is “mentioned in the saint’s Life [Arb.: al-tashʿīth; transliteration of Syr.: tashʿītā] found in the Melkite Church in Mayāfāriqīn,” a book in which, he says, the building of the city and of the church are narrated.759 He says he summoned the priest who lived at the church, asked him about the document, but the latter mentioned irrelevant things.760 Upon this, Ibn al-Azraq took the said book from the priest, and brought it to a Christian man, who read the book in Syriac

757 Karim Farouk al-Kholy and Yusuf Baluken, eds., Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn by Ibn al-Azraq al- Fāriqī (Istanbul: Enes Matbaacilik, 2014), 103-114; H. F. Amedroz, “Three Arabic mss. on the history of the city of Mayyāfāriqīn,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Oct. 1902): 785-812; E. Tisserant, “Marouta de Maypherqat,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (1928), 10: 148-49; Jean Maurice Fiey, “Mārūtā de Martyropolis d’après Ibn al-Azraq (+1181),” An. Boll. 94 (1976): 35-45; Carole Hillenbrand, “The history of the Jazīra 1100-1150: The contribution of Ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriqī,” 2 vols, PhD diss. (University of Edinburgh, 1979); Chase Robinson, “Ibn al-Azraq, his ‘Ta’rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn,’ and early Islam,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 6, no. 1 (1996): 7-27; Harry Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq, Saint Marūthā, and the foundation of Mayyafāriqīn (Martyropolis),” in Writing ‘True Stories’, 149-174. 758 In the Christian tradition, there are Greek and Armenian lives of Marūthā, possibly based on a now-lost Syriac version. For an overview of scholarship, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154-55. 759 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. 760 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103 (ghayr maqṣūd).

230 and translated it into Arabic. According to this book, Ibn al-Azraq says, the church which was in the outskirts of the city in his time, had been entrusted by Christ.761 After connecting a building in his city to the prophetic time frame, he narrates the life of Marūthā and the

Christian history of Maypherqat.

According to Ibn al-Azraq’s narrative, the governor of the town and the whole region was a man named Liyūṭā, who was revered by the Roman king, and was under his protection.762 He got married to Maryam, the daughter of the chief of a nearby mountain which was known to his readers,763 and had three children, the youngest of which was

Marūthā. The Roman king in this time period, Ibn al-Azraq says, was Theodosius the

Younger the Greek (possibly referring to Theodosius II, r. 401-450).764 Marūthā busied himself with gaining knowledge and wisdom, and when his father Liyūṭā died, all the territory he had governed was subject to Marūthā’s rule; “God granted him knowledge, asceticism, and piety.”765 He used to live, Ibn al-Azraq says, in the church that is in the outskirts of the city in his time, connecting once again the landscape of his time to the pre-

Islamic persona and his story. Returning to Marūthā’s lifetime, he says his city and the whole territory he used to govern were in between the Roman and the Persian kingdoms, and the king on the Persian throne was Sābūr b. Ardashīr, who slaughtered Christian monks

761 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103 (kāna fī-hā bayʿa man ʿahada al-masīḥ ʿalayhi al- salām). 762 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. 763 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104 (bint ra’īs hadha al-jabal fī-hi al-‘ān al-sanāsana). Al-sanāsana was probably an Armenian tribe on a mountain north of Maypherqat. V. Minorsky, A History of Sharvān and Darband in the 10th – 11th Centuries (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1958), 172. I would like to thank Michael Payne for this reference. 764 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103, “al-ṣaghīr al-yūnānī.” For this and the other anachronisms in Ibn al-Azraq’s account, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154-56. 765 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104 (ātāhu allāh min al-ʿulūm wal-zuhd wal-dīn).

231 and ascetics.766 The king Theodosius, Ibn al-Azraq continues, married Helena, who was the daughter of a man from the royal descendants of the Edessan kings.767 Theodosius and

Helena had a son, Qusṭantīn, who founded and built up the city of Constantinople, which had previously been called “bizanṭiya.”768

After introducing Constantine, Ibn al-Azraq returns to Marūthā, who built numerous buildings in the city of Maypherqat. Ibn al-Azraq mentions the oral tradition about Marūthā, according to which every old monastery in the region was built by him.

Marūthā was requested by king Shapur to heal his daughter, and with the support of the

Roman king, he traveled to Persia, and healed Shapur’s daughter.769 As a result of this miracle, the king Shapur asked him for a wish, and Marūthā requested a peace treaty between him and Constantine. He also asked for the bones of the Persian martyrs, brought them back to his land, and buried them in his city. Constantine granted Marūthā patronage to build churches, then dispatched envoys to inspect whether his name was inscribed on the church and the fortress. The envoys wrote back to the king affirmatively. Following this, Ibn al-Azraq gives two reports, with “it is said in the oral tradition,” about the building processes.770 It is not clear whether these parts are paraphrases from the translation of the

Life, the translator’s notes, or Ibn al-Azraq’s own additions from his external oral sources.

These additions are important, however, in emphasizing Marūthā’s connection to and patronage under Roman and Persian kings in the process of building his city. Ibn al-Azraq

766 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104. 767 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104 (bint min-ahl al-ruhā min-awlād al-mulūk). 768 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 105. 769 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 105-6. According to the Armenian and Greek lives this king was Yazdgerd I (r. 399-420). Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 156. 770 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 107-8 (qīl fī-riwāya).

232 also notes an enormous painting of the Cross in the middle of the great church he built, the first church built in the city.

In the next section in the Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, we are informed that three ministers of Constantine also built fortresses, churches, and baths in the city, the remains of some of which were visible at the time of Ibn al-Azraq.771 In one of these churches the builders had placed some great walls, and Ibn al-Azraq says that people from the community in his time noticed some of the church’s walls, much of which was destroyed.772 In fact, as he narrates the buildings erected under the patronage of Constantine, he explains their positions with reference to the main gates of the city, giving information about the buildings’ later histories. Thus, he presents the Islamic history of the city as a continuation of its Roman-

Christian past. Then, Ibn al-Azraq returns to Marūthā again, and says he brought from

Constantinople a glass basin filled with the blood of Yūshaʿ b. Nūn.773 He also built a monastery in the name of the apostles Paul and Peter, and he made a baptismal font in it.

Ibn al-Azraq says this monastery still stands, in the Jewish street, close to the synagogue.774

As a final note from the Life, Ibn al-Azraq says that the burial of Marūthā is in the same church where his Life is kept.775 He continues, however, to narrate the time of Constantine, and says when the city was conquered, they found a tablet above one of the gates, which read, in Greek, as “this fortress was built in the days of the king Constantine and his mother

771 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 108. 772 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 108 (adrakat jamāʿa min al-nās baʿḍ ḥīṭānihā wa-kāna nuqiḍu aktharuhā). 773 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 110-1. 774 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111. 775 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111.

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Helena, and in the days of Anṭūs and al-Dakūs, and the names of the three builders are

Basīl, and Naqīṭā and Qusṭanṭīn.”776

Ibn al-Azraq says that after the time of Marūthā many monks, ascetics and lay people inhabited the buildings of the city, and he continues with the pre-Islamic history of the city with the Persian conquest of the eastern Mediterranean under Kisrā (possibly referring to Chosroes II, r. 591-628).777 He gives the chronology of Muhammad’s birth and hijra with reference to Chosroes’ reign, and thus the pre-Islamic history of the city is aligned with the Islamic time frame. Then, he returns to the Islamic history of the city with the conquest of the region under ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb during the time of the Byzantine king

Heraclius (r. 610-641). 778 He says immediately before this the Persians defeated the

Byzantines, and God sent the following verses: “Alif, lām, mīm. The Byzantines have been defeated in the nearby land, but they, after their defeat, will overcome,” the first three verses of sūrat al-rūm (Q30). Then, Ibn al-Azraq says that Quraysh appeared upon the

Byzantines, and they said: “We are without a book; the Persians are without a book, but the Byzantines are People of the Book, and Muhammad is the owner of the Book.”779 Thus, he emphasizes the special place the Byzantines had in the unfolding of qur’ānic salvation history as a People of the Book, above the “book-less” peoples like the Persians and the pagan Arabs. And as a final note at the end of this section Ibn al-Azraq says he will narrate

776 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111. It is not clear who Anṭūs and al-Dakūs are, nor the three builders, whom the author introduces as “viziers” of Constantine. For the inaccurate spelling of proper nouns in general in this work, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154. 777 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 113. 778 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 114. 779 Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 114. (naḥnu b-ghayr kitāb, wal-fars bi-ghayr kitāb, wal- rūm ahl al-kitāb, wa-muḥammad ṣāḥib kitāb.)

234 how the Byzantines returned victorious, as mentioned in the qur’ānic verses, in the second chapter of his book.

Christian hagiography in local Islamic historiography

Harry Munt argues that since Ibn al-Azraq muted the Christian features of his source and emphasized the triumph of Islam in a previously Christian city, one should categorize the transmission of this saint’s Life as cultural appropriation, rather than syncretism.780 The figure of Marūthā as a Christian and his sanctity, Munt emphasizes, were insignificant for the Muslim historian. According to the conventions of Muslim historiography to present a mythical, glorious pre-Islamic past of cities, Munt argues, the author needed a source for the pre-Islamic past of his city in order to “fill the space” and contextualize the landscape of his time; and the Life of Marūthā was at his disposal.781 Since he did not have a significant Christian audience, he further argues, it is unlikely that the use of a Christian text carried a particular meaning in and of itself; he was writing for a Muslim audience to highlight the Islamization of a previously Christian city.782

Ibn al-Azraq’s paraphrase of the Life, however, gives significant information about the hero’s Christian background. It is true that Marūthā is not explicitly referred to as a bishop. Nevertheless, his building of churches and monasteries, his struggle for collecting martyrs’ bones, his personal connection to and protection by the Christian king are emphasized in Ibn al-Azraq’s text. And these were significant cultural inheritances for

780 Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 173-4. 781 Ibid., 159-64. 782 Ibid., 164.

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Maypherqat and its buildings. The representation leaves no doubt that the author is depicting a Christian hero founding a magnificent Christian city. His commentary on the buildings of the city in his time, through the detailed information provided by the saint’s

Life, demonstrates his use of the story as an etiology. Giving a textual tour of the city to his readers, Ibn al-Azraq both builds the cityscape by giving descriptions of the buildings, and embeds that landscape within a historical moment, the time of the bishop Marūthā.

Elucidating Maypherqat’s origins with an extensive use of the Life indicates the level of esteem the Roman-Christian past provided for the city.

Munt’s approach underestimates the symbolic value of Roman-Christian past for

Muslim audiences.783 Ibn al-Azraq’s use of the Life of Marūthā was not merely a utilitarian act. Although it might have been the only textual source that was available to him, his working with that source is an interesting case of hagiographical transmission. Ibn al-Azraq did not simply have the text translated; he informs the readers that he changed translators once the first one gave him irrelevant information. He provided detailed descriptions of

Marūthā’s background, pious deeds, and especially building projects. Moreover, he appears to have included oral tradition in his narrative. Although it is not clear whether these are his own collections, or what his translator told him, it is important for us to see that his version of the story is not merely a paraphrase but an amalgamation of textual and oral sources about the Christian saintly hero who founded his city. Certainly, the

Islamization of the city is narrated and glorified in his work, but this was not done in the expense of the Christian past. Byzantine-Christian history was a source of pride and

783 For an extensive treatment of various representations of the emperor Constantine I in Islamic historiography, see Jonathan Stutz, Constantinus Arabicus: Die arabische Geschichtsschreibung und das christliche Rom (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2017).

236 esteem, and Ibn al-Azraq makes this explicit through the way he uses, positions, and expands his source.

Looking at the present through hagiography

Other examples of the usage of pre-Islamic saints and heroes in local historiographies are found in antiquarian collections of marvels and curiosities, into which the folkloric lore and oral tradition of places were often integrated. Hanaoka, for instance, gives a brief overview of the thirteenth-century Iranian historian Ibn Isfandiyār’s use of legends about biblical prophets, caliphs, old practices, stories of dragons, and other folklore in his History of Tabaristan.784 According to her analysis, these had been parts of the pre-Islamic heritage of the region that were placed within an Islamic narrative frame, and thus were preserved to fulfill a few possible semiotic roles. One of these roles was to explain the social practices and the religious landscape of Ibn Isfandiyār’s time.

Examples are also found in travel and pilgrimage literature. For example, al-

Harawī’s (thirteenth c.) Kitāb al-ishārāt, a survey of pilgrimage sites in the eastern

Mediterranean, involves many details about shrines and monasteries that seem to have been based on hagiographical stories circulating in orature and literature. For instance, about a village near Aleppo, al-Harawī writes:

Rūḥīn, a village in one of the districts of Aleppo contains the tomb of Quss ibn Sāʿida al-Iyādī, and his two companions, whom he mourned in verse. […] It is said that the two are Shamʿūn al-Ṣafā and Shamʿān. The truth is that Shamʿūn al-Ṣafā is [buried] in the great city of the Byzantines in its main church in a chest of silver suspended by chains from the ceiling of the sanctuary. God knows best.785

784 Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 215-7. 785 Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, 12-15.

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Quss b. Sāʿida al-Iyādī was a pre-Islamic poet and orator who was often portrayed as an ascetic.786 The two comrades mentioned here are the biblical Simon Peter and Simeon the Stylite, respectively.787 Although the historicity of Quss and the writings attributed to him are widely debated,788 al-Harawī’s account is a great testimony to the phenomenon of hagiographical conflation. We see in this example a specific location venerated as the tomb of a semi-legendary Arab orator, whose sanctity was legitimized through his personal connections to two Christian figures, Peter the Apostle and Simeon the Stylite, albeit with an anachronistic juxtaposition. At one location, pre-Islamic Arab past, biblical history, a highly venerated late antique saint, and the venerability of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople are woven together. Similarly, a prominent example of using Christian hagiographical knowledge to explain the past as well as the present landscape of a place is found in the prolific Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī’s (d. 1442) al-Mawāʿiẓ wal-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wal-āthār.789 In his work on the history of Egypt, al-Maqrīzī uses the memory of St.

Antony, other monastic fathers of the Egyptian desert, as well as Roman-Christian kings in order to contextualize the religious landscape of his time.

Based on Ibn al-Azraq’s text and the other examples cited above, we can build a theoretical frame according to which the fulfillment of the following three criteria renders

786 Pellat, “Ḳuss b. Sāʿida,” in EI2. 787 Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, 47-48. 788 Pellat, “Ḳuss b. Sāʿida,” in EI2. 789 F. Rosenthal, “al-Maḳrīzī,” in EI2; Taqiyy al-Dīn Abdul-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al- Qādir al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ wal-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wal-āthār [Lesson and Consideration in the Remembrance of Districts and Traditions], ed. Ayman Fu’ād Sayyid, 6 vols. (London: Al- Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2013); French translation in Jules Leroy, “Le couvents des chrétiens. Traduction de l’arabe d’al-Makrīzī,” ROC 13 (1908): 33-46, 192-204.

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Christian hagiography a source of etiological information: 1) The story is integrated into a chronological time frame, and its temporal significance is strictly pre-Islamic. 2) The

Muslim author provides a minimal commentary on the sanctity of the Christian hero of the story (despite giving details about his life and pious deeds). 3) The information given is historically contextualized to explain a contemporary phenomenon (such as a building, a belief, or a religious practice), and is not interpreted for any further conceptualization. It is similar to the previously presented category of Christian saints as excellences (faḍā’il) of cities and regions, and we do not need to draw a sharp distinction between these two categories. But, in the current category the Christian hagiographical story is connected to a local practice or landscape, whereas in the other one its connection to the broader qur’ānic sanctity and time frame is more emphasized.

3.5. Concluding remarks

We have covered five roles Christian hagiographical narratives and personas fulfilled in

Islamic literature. The previous chapter demonstrated the most prominent of these roles:

Hagiographical knowledge was an immensely important hermeneutical tool for elucidating numerous qur’ānic verses, which often vaguely allude to events, persons, and places. The examples from Islamic literature analyzed in the current chapter show that Christian hagiography also played significant role in 1) exhorting the audiences on universal modes of piety and wisdom; 2) presenting the merits and excellences of towns and regions; 3) defining the members of the eternal Muslim umma; and 4) presenting the origins of Islamic landscapes and practices. All of these categories, albeit often overlapping, manifest different modes of transmission of Christian hagiographical knowledge into the Islamic

239 tradition, and different modes of presentation and reinterpretation of Christian holy men in

Islamic semiotic systems.

The example of St. Antony of Egypt, through the pen of an Abbasid court moralist, demonstrates the adaptation of a Christian saint and his hagiographical dossier for the purposes of exhorting the reader on confidence and perseverance in faith. In local historiography of south Arabia, we find a monotheist king of Himyar, whose conquests, travels, and spiritual search are interwoven into the qur’ānic time frame and are portrayed with tropes from the Christian hagiographical dossier of Alexander the Great. The Two- horned king, a literary shadow image of Alexander the Great, is presented as an embodiment of the sanctity of south Arabia. In al-Ṭabarī’s portrayal, St. George becomes a Muslim prior to Muhammad in universal historiography. Compared to the previous examples, the Christian features and discourse of this hagiographical narrative are significantly muted, and the saint’s participation in the qur’ānic salvation history is emphasized. And finally, in the example of St. Marūthā, we capture the memory of a

Christian saint that connects the landscape of a medieval Islamic city in Asia Minor to a long-gone Christian Roman Empire.

Some of these cases of transmission display a certain level of de-Christianization of the story and the hero: Ibn al-Azraq’s Marūthā stayed strictly Christian, for example, while al-Ṭabarī’s Jirjīs is referred to as a Muslim follower of Jesus. Similarly, they all show various extents to which the new version of the narrative is Islamicised. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s

Antony, who is presented as a Christian ascetic, is given mostly a universal monotheistic discourse, while Jirjīs quotes from the Qur’ān. It is not tenable to attribute a certain mode

240 of transmission to any particular Islamic literary genre. In fact, I do not think a functionalist and structuralist categorization is possible.

The examples underline the complexity of transmission processes, which could occur at the level of persona, broad knowledge of a saint’s dossier, or a specific narrative.

Muslim authors in some instances transmitted the name and the broad hagiographical image of a saint, attributing a new story to him, like in the case of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s

Antony. In other cases, their version of a saint’s story so closely parallels a Christian version of the story that it is tenable to argue for a direct textual transmission, like Ibn al-

Azraq’s Marūthā. The examples also point at the multivocality of traditions prior to Islam.

Hagiographical conflations, confusions, changes, and expansions were frequently observed in saints’ stories in the Christian milieu. Such mechanisms thus distribute hagiographical agency between Islamic and pre-Islamic authors and transmitters. With the insights into hagiographical transmission and authorship the examples have provided, I now turn to an in-depth analysis of the transmission and reception history of a fifth-century Syriac hagiographical narrative across Islamic literature until the fourteenth century. Focusing on one text significantly strengthens the analysis of the functions of Christian hagiography in

Islamic literature, since it clarifies the multiple roles Christian saints’ stories played in

Islam by keeping the story as a constant, and highlighting the diachronic contexts it is embedded in.

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CHAPTER 4: FROM PAUL AND JOHN TO FĪMYŪN AND ṢĀLIḤ

This chapter analyzes the transmission and reception history of a fifth-century Syriac hagiographical story in Christian and Islamic literature up to the fourteenth century.790 The

History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qenṭos and Priest John of Edessa is a Syriac hagiographical text, written in late-fifth century in Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa, in south

Turkey).791 Abridged due to an extended transmission history, the story of Paul and John

(renamed in Arabic as Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ) appears in various Islamic sources from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The earliest surviving Islamic version is in the Sīra of

Muhammad.792 The story was often used to present the pre-Islamic, particularly Christian, history of south Arabia, although the literary function the story fulfilled varies across multiple time periods and literary genres. In this chapter, I explore the following: 1) In which texts in Christian and Islamic literature does the story of Paul and John appear? 2)

How did the story transform as a result of the transmission processes? 3) Who were the transmitters of the story, particularly in the Islamic context? 4) What functions did the story of Paul and John fulfill in Islamic literature?

790 An earlier version of this chapter has been accepted for publication in Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance, eds. Aaron Butts and Robin Darling Young (Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming). 791 Hans Arneson, Emanuel Fiano, Christine Luckritz Marquis, and Kyle Smith, The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qenṭos and Priest John of Edessa (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010); a summary is provided in François Nau, “Hagiographie syriaque,” Revue de l’Orient Chrétienne 15 (1910): 56-60. 792 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14-16. Guillaume transliterates the saint’s name as Faymiyūn, although Fīmyūn is most probably a better transliteration, as I will demonstrate below.

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In order to answer the questions above, I will first give an overview of the literary works in which the story of Paul (Fīmyūn) and John (Ṣāliḥ) appears. Then I will show the transformation of the story, comparing the Arabic version in the Sīra to the Syriac narrative. After these descriptive sections, I will analyze the transmission, adaptation, and the role of the story in four later texts in Islamic literature, namely, in al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 923)

Tārīkh al-rusul wal-mulūk, 793 Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s (d. 1229) Muʿjam al-buldān, 794 Ibn

ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) Muḥāḍarat al-abrār wa-musāmarat al-akhyār,795 and in Ibn Kathīr’s (d.

1373) al-Bidāya wal-nihāya.796

4.1. Texts

Paul and John in Syriac

The story of Paul and John narrates the piety, exploits, and pilgrimages of two ascetic men in the setting of the fifth-century eastern Mediterranean (though, at points, extending to

Italy and south Arabia). The earliest manuscripts that include the story are from the sixth

793 C. E. Bosworth, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 5: The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids and Yemen (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). He reports on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq, which shows that the story was a part of Ibn Isḥāq’s composition and not added by Ibn Hishām to the Sīra. 794 Shihāb al-Dīn Abī ʿAbd Allāh Yāqūt ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥamawī al-Rūmī al-Baghdādī, Muʿjam al-buldān [Dictionary (lit.: Wonders) of Countries], 7 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1995-1996); partial translation in Wadie Jwaideh, trans., The Introduction Chapters of Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al- Buldān (Leiden: Brill, 1959). 795 Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat al-abrār wa-musāmarat al-akhyār [Lectures of the Pious and Conversations of the Righteous], ed. Muḥammad Mursī al-Khawlī (Cairo: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1972), 249-52. 796 Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wal-nihāya [The Beginning and the End] (Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1982), 2:168.

243 century, although the story itself probably was written in the fifth.797 Whether it was originally written in Greek or Syriac is uncertain. Yet, it is likely that the story circulated in both languages.798 There are twelve Syriac and two Greek (much later) manuscript witnesses to the story of Paul and John in the Christian tradition.799 The translation I use here, prepared by Arneson and others, is based on the four earliest manuscripts at the

British Library. The story appears to have been mostly transmitted together with other, often West Syrian, hagiographical literature, such as the Life of the Man of God, the Seven

Sleepers of Ephesus, the Life of Abraham Qīdūnayā, the Life of Julian Saba, and the

Martyrs of Najrān, to cite a few.

The story consists of forty-five paragraphs of varying length. The storyline can be divided into roughly four thematic sections: 1) Paul, a bishop in Italy (or Pontus, per the

Greek tradition), leaves his city and arrives at Edessa during the episcopacy of the bishop

Rabbula (r. 411-435). While he works in this city as a day-laborer he meets the priest John, who becomes his admirer, companion, and disciple. 2) Paul and John go on a pilgrimage, during which they are kidnapped by Arabs and taken to the “land of the Himyarites,” that is, south Arabia.800 With the help of prayers and miracles they convert the tree-worshipping

Himyarites to Christianity. 3) During their return to Syria they encounter a dendrite (tree-

797 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 19. 798 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 19-21. 799 Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent et al., “Paul the bishop and John the priest (text),” in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, last modified November 5, 2015, http://syriaca.org/work/1127. 800 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 7. For similar tropes about the dangers of the desert in the Christian imagination, see Daniel Caner, trans., History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai. Including Translations of Pseudo-Nilus’ Narrations, Report on the Slaughter of the Monks of Sinai and Rhaithou, and Anastasius of Sinai’s Tales of the Sinai Fathers, Translated Texts for Historians 53 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 39-50, esp. 48.

244 dwelling ascetic) who claims to have been waiting for them. Following the demise of the dendrite, Paul and John bury him and proceed to Jerusalem; then, they arrive back at

Edessa. 4) Paul goes on another journey alone; John searches for him until he discovers in a dream that Paul had passed away in Nisibis. The story might have been initially written by the priest John, Paul’s disciple and companion, for the narrator in the text uses the first- person plural, and occasionally singular, especially in the second half of the story.

A few notes on the broader literary context of the story of Paul and John: In terms of emplotment and tropes, it closely resembles another fifth-century hagiographical text that is associated with the episcopacy of the bishop Rabbula, namely, the Life of the Man of God.801 Although anonymous in the Syriac tradition, the Man of God was a holy man in

Italy who left his hometown and went to Edessa, like Paul. His relationship to his servant

(who wrote and narrated the story of the Man of God) closely resembles the one between

Paul and John.802 In addition to this structural resemblance, there are verbatim references in the story of Paul and John to that of the Man of God.803 Moreover, within the Syriac manuscript tradition, in all of the surviving seven manuscripts dating between the sixth and the thirteenth centuries, the story of the Man of God immediately precedes the story of Paul and John.804 These observations make it safe to assume that the two stories belong to the same hagiographical tradition: fifth/sixth century, Syriac, Edessan tradition, having

801 The Syriac version of this text is edited in A. Amiaud, La légende syriaque de saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1889); an English translation is available in Robert Doran, Stewards of the Poor: The Man of God, Rabbula and Hiba in Fifth-Century Edessa (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2006), 3-40. 802 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 16-17. 803 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 78. 804 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 20-21.

245 originated in association with the persona of Rabbula.805 Thus, it is highly probable that in some later written and/or oral tradition the two stories, that of Paul and John and that of the

Man of God, converged and were amalgamated, a possibility to which we will briefly return.

The important part in the story of Paul and John for our purposes here is the episode about the conversion of Himyarites to Christianity, since it is this section that was emphasized in the versions in the Islamic tradition. Paul and John, according to the story, evangelize the tree-worshipping Himyarites, by uprooting the most prominent cultic tree of the community. This motif, however, is rather isolated in the ancient accounts dedicated to the historiography of south Arabia. The ancient and modern scholarship mostly focus on the region’s role in religious, economic, and military encounters between Byzantium,

Persia, and the Kingdom of Axum (Ethiopia/Eritrea), as well as on the oppression and persecution of Christians under Jewish kings in the sixth century.806

To briefly overview: Eusebius (fourth c.) says that Pantaenus the Philosopher was

“the herald of the Gospel of Christ in India” (i.e. south Arabia).807 John Malalas (sixth c.)

805 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 16ff. 806 Paul Maier, trans., Eusebius. The Church History: A New Translation with Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1999), 5:10; Henry Bronson Dewing, trans., Procopius. History of the Wars (London: W. Heinemann; New York: The Macmillan co., 1914-1940), 1:xvii.43-48, xix.1-7; Edward Walford, trans., Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgus (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), 3:4; Witold Witakowski, trans., Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 51ff; Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffresy and Roger Scott, trans., The Chronicle of John Malalas, (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 18:15-16 (section 433-36, 457-59); R. H. Charles, trans., The Chronicle of John of Nikiu (London, 1916), 69; E. W. Brooks, “The Hymn of John Psaltes,” Patrologia Orientalis 7 (1911): 613-614; Irfan Shahīd, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1984); J. Spencer Trimingham, Christianity Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (Beirut: Librarie du Liban, 1990); René Tardy, Najrān: Chrétiens d’Arabie avant l’islam (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq Éditeurs, 1999); Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 9ff. 807 Eusebius, Church History, 5:10.

246 mentions the conflicts and wars between Axoumites and Homerites, and that a paramonarios from Alexandria, named John, appointed as the first bishop of Homerites.808

In the story of the Martyrs of Najrān (a Christian community that was persecuted under

Jewish kings of Yemen in the early sixth century) Paul (interestingly a namesake of the hero of our story) is mentioned as the first bishop of Najrān, coming from Alexandria.809

Among these various Christian traditions, to my knowledge, there is not an abbreviated version of the story of Paul and John. Perhaps a relatively close parallel is found in

Sozomen’s (fifth-century church historian, d. ca.450) Ecclesiastical History, where two ascetics, Frumentius and Edesius from Tyre, are captured and taken to “India,” where they are raised at the king’s palace and convert the masses to Christianity. 810 Later on,

Frumentius is appointed as the first bishop of the Indians by Athanasius of Alexandria, according to this tradition. This short story given by Sozomen has significant differences from that of Paul and John. Yet, the main contours of the storyline are similar to the latter; in both of the stories two ascetics are taken captive and brought to south Arabia, and they convert the king as well as crowds of people to Christianity.

Among the various accounts of the conversion of south Arabia to Christianity, clearly there was a tradition of two ascetics converting the region, and the author of the story of Paul and John seems to have used that pattern. The oft-repeated connection of this conversion to the bishopric of Alexandria, however, is obscured in our text, since Paul and

John are from Edessa. Thus, the story of Paul and John participates in a broader Christian

808 John Malalas, Chronicle 18.15-16. 809 Shahīd, Martyrs of Najran. 810 Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Chester D. Hartranft, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890.), 2:24.

247 historiographical tradition regarding the evangelization of south Arabia, albeit by bringing in significant novelties (such as tree-worship) and reorientations (from Alexandria to

Edessa).

Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in Arabic

The earliest surviving text that includes an abbreviated version of the story of Paul and

John in Islamic literature is the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq.811 As mentioned previously, the story, with minor variations, is also found in prominent works by al-Ṭabarī, Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī,

Ibn ʿArabī, and Ibn Kathīr, and we will return to these later literary contexts. In the Sīra version, the conversion of south Arabia to Christianity is attributed to two wandering ascetics, whose names are Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ.812 Ibn Isḥāq relates, on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih, that a pious and ascetic man named Fīmyūn used to live in Syria, where he met his companion Ṣāliḥ. The two men left their village in Syria, and on the way, they encountered a tree-dweller, who was waiting for them. After the dendrite passed away

Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ were kidnapped by Arabs and taken to Najrān. By uprooting a cultic tree

Fīmyūn converted the tree-worshipping pagans of Najrān to the religion of ʿĪsā b. Maryam.

In scholarship, the hypotheses suggested for the origin of this story in the Sīra have mostly been based on the employment of generic tropes or onomastic similarities. Gordon

Newby claims that this story in the Sīra was derived from the Apophthegmata Patrum.813

As Newby demonstrates, numerous themes and topoi in the Apophthegmata are indeed

811 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14-16. 812 Ṣāliḥ literally means “a righteous person,” and we will return to this name shortly. 813 Gordon Newby, “An Example of Coptic Literary Influence on Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīrah,” JNES 31, no. 1 (1972): 22-28.

248 quite similar to the ones in the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, such as humility, the power to heal, and being taken captive. However, these motifs are generic functions in hagiography, found in many narratives, and thus, their employment does not indicate any intertextualities. Harry Norris argues that the Yemeni historiography most possibly arose in connection with the Persian occupation of the region in the sixth century.814 Axel

Moberg points in the same direction, and argue for a Persian origin for the story.815 Jürgen

Tubach is closer in his analysis to pointing out a source, suggesting that the Life of the Man of God is the origin of the story.816 However, the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ is most probably a redaction of that of Paul and John, for many details in the two stories are strikingly parallel to each other, to which we now turn for a close comparative analysis.

4.2. From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ

We have a fifth-century Syriac hagiographical text, which, in the eighth century, appears in the Islamic literature in a shortened form. There is a period of two centuries between the

Syriac story of Paul and John and the edition of Ibn Isḥāq’s account of the conversion of

Najrān. It is highly possible that the story appeared in different versions in both Christian and Islamic oral and written traditions during this interval.817 Although this intermediate stage is impossible to trace or reconstruct, it is still useful to conduct a close comparative

814 Harry T. Norris, “Fables and Legends in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. Beeston et al., 383. 815 Quoted in J. Ryckmans, Le christianisme en Arabie du Sud préislamique (Rome: Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1964), 441-42. 816 Jürgen Tubach, “Das Anfänge des Christentums in Südarabien: Eine Christliche Legende Syrischer Herkunft in Ibn Hišām,” Parole de l’Orient 18 (1993): 101-111. 817 For early Islamic historiography’s reliance on oral tradition, a starting point is Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 25ff; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, passim.

249 analysis between the Christian (Syriac) version, and the earliest known Islamic (Arabic) version, which is in the Sīra, in order to have a glimpse of the transmission process.818

Al-Mughīra b. Abū Lābīd, a freedman of al-Akhnas, on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih the Yamanī told me that the origin of Christianity in Najrān was due to a man named Fīmyūn, who was a righteous, earnest, ascetic man whose prayers were answered.

Let us begin the analysis with the replacement of the name Paul with Fīmyūn/Faymiyūn in the Arabic version. Newby suggests that the name can be a transliteration of Apa Poimen, one of the most prominent monastic figures of Egypt in the fifth century, to whom many texts and stories were attributed.819 Irfan Shahīd similarly stated that this name might have come from the Greek word poimēn (meaning a “shepherd, lord, master”), or a corruption of the name Pantaenus in the Arabic script.820 Tubach argues that “Faymiyūn” was the

Arabicized version of the Greek name Euphemion/Phemion/Euphemianos and associates

Wahb b. Munabbih’s transmission of the story with the Man of God mentioned above, which I find the most plausible.821 Although the Man of God is anonymous, or identified as Alexius in the later tradition, his father’s name is Euphemianus,822 and this name might have found its way into the story of Paul and John through a confusion in transmission.

Considering that the two hagiographical stories are very similar to each other and almost

818 I fully quote Guillaume’s translation of Ibn Isḥāq’s version of the story here, with slight corrections. For the Syriac, I use the edition and translation prepared by Arneson et al. 819 Newby, “Coptic literary influence,” 27. 820 Shahīd, Fourth Century, 87 fn. 47. Note that Paul is referred to as a “shepherd of souls” in the Syriac story. 821 Tubach, “Christliche legende,” 108. 822 Doran, Stewards of the Poor, 30. For an extensive analysis of the story of Saint Alexis and his father Eufemien in the Old French tradition see Karl Uitti, Story, Myth and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050-1200 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 3-64.

250 always were placed in sequential order in manuscripts, the story of the Man of God and of

Paul and John might have converged at a later time.823 This explains why the name of the holy man as provided by Ibn Ishāq, fymywn (unvoweled), should be transliterated as

Fīmyūn. Despite this possible connection to the story of the Man of God, the entire section about the conversion of Najrān and other details demonstrate that the story of Fīmyūn and

Ṣāliḥ was derived from that of Paul and John, not from the story of the Man of God.

The Syriac story initially locates Paul in Italy (the Greek tradition in Pontus, which might be a misspelling). The bishop Paul then travels to Edessa, where he meets his disciple

John. None of the Arabic versions mentions a provenance in Italy, nor do they allude to the

Edessan bishop Mar Rabbula. The Islamic tradition was interested mostly in a particular episode, namely, the coming of Christianity to south Arabia. The Muslim authors make this intention clear, by stating up front that they are giving an account of the

Christianization of idol-worshippers of Najrān. However, the Syriac story refers to the location of this conversion as the “land of Himyarites,” which can be any location in south

Arabia.824 Himyar was a well-known location in the Greco-Roman topography. Procopius refers to the Himyarites as Homeritae, allies of the Roman Empire together with the

Kingdom of Axum, and known for their palm groves.825 Najrān, on the other hand, is a particular fertile valley in south Arabia, known for its Christian communities in antiquity.

823 Confluence of stories and saints is a common hagiographical phenomenon. The story of Alexis, for instance, is noted to have also been confused with that of St. John the Calybite, who was known to have lived in Constantinople, left his parents for his ascetic endeavors, and returned home in disguise, like the Man of God. Uitti, Story, Myth and Celebration, 31; Guiseppe Caliò, “Giovanni Calibita,” Bibliotheca Sanctorum (Rome, 1961), 6:640-41; “Ioannes Calybita,” Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 2nd ed. (Bruxellis: Societes des Bollandistes, 1909), 121. 824 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 7. 825 Procopius, Wars, 1: xix (7-16).

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In the letters of the sixth-century bishop Simeon of Bēth Arshām, the people and the language of the city of Najrān are mentioned.826 Therefore, there was possibly a semantic difference between Najrānites and Himyarites in antiquity. Nevertheless, the toponym changed from “Himyar” to “Najrān” in the transmission process between Christianity and

Islam, possibly for the story to serve one of its roles in its Islamic context, a point to which we will return.

Fīmyūn is simply described as a “righteous, earnest, and ascetic man” in Ibn Isḥāq’s version.827 In the Syriac version Paul’s description is longer, emphasizing his ecclesiastic title, a bishop, “a shepherd of souls.” Paul prays to God and asks Jesus Christ to shine forth from his cross and show him the right way. In his dream God answers him, saying that if he wants to become like a pillar of fire, he should serve the priesthood, with an allusion to

Exodus 13:21.828 In the Islamic version this section with strong biblical imagery is cut out, and it is summarized as “whose prayers were answered.” This constitutes a clear example of a common practice of silencing Christian elements during the transmission of texts from

Christian to the Islamic literature.829

He used to wander between towns: as soon as he became known in one town he moved to another, eating only what he earned, for he was a builder by trade using mud bricks. He used to keep Sunday as a day of rest and would not work then. He used to go into a desert place and pray there until evening.

826 Shahīd, Martyrs of Najrān, 40, 45. 827 “wa-kāna rajulan ṣāliḥan mujtahidan zāhidan.” 828 Ex. 13:21: “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.” 829 Swanson, “Arabic hagiography,” 351; Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 159; M. Kister, “The Sīrah literature,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds. Beeston et al., 354-357.

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At the beginning of the Syriac story Paul came to Edessa and “worked as a day laborer.”830

The Syriac story says he does not work on the holy days of Friday and Sunday, on which he goes to the desert to find Christ and help the poor and ascetics living in the desert.

According to the Arabic version he goes to the desert to pray on Sunday. This change in the day is interesting, for it demonstrates that early Muslim transmitters made Fīmyūn rest on a Sunday, not on a Friday which was a holy day for Jews and Christians in late antiquity and beyond.831 Other Christian terminology and discourse is again omitted in the Islamic paraphrase of this section.

While he was following his trade in a Syrian village, withdrawing himself from men, one of the people there called Ṣāliḥ perceived what manner of man he was and felt a vehement affection for him, so that unperceived by Fīmyūn he used to follow him from place to place, until one Sunday he went as his wont was out into the desert followed by Ṣāliḥ. Ṣāliḥ chose a hiding-place and sat down where he could see him, not wanting him to know where he was.

The story of Paul and John briefly describes John, Paul’s companion, as a priest with a desire for monastic life.832 His encounter with Paul is through a work at his house for which he hires Paul as a workman. John one day follows Paul going out and sees him praying on

830 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 32. 831 C. H. Becker, “On the History of Muslim Worship,” in The Development of Islamic Ritual, ed. Gerald Hawting (Burlington, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 49-74. It is to be noted that unlike the widespread belief today, Friday is not considered a holy day in the premodern Islamic tradition. The shift from praying on Fridays and Sundays to only Sundays might, of course, have happened in the Christian milieu as well, before the story reached Muslim transmitters. But such a shift is not observed in the later manuscript witnesses of the Syriac story. I am thankful to Christine Luckritz Marquiz for pointing out this possibility. 832 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 34.

253 a mountain. Watching the holy man secretly, John sheds tears. The affectionate love of

John for Paul finds direct echo in the Islamic version. The onomastic change is also worth elaborating on, for “Ṣāliḥ” does not appear to be an Arabicized version of a foreign word.833

It is an Arabic name, with connotations of “good, righteous, pious, God-fearing.”834 It is also the name of a Qur’ānic prophet sent to the Arab people of Thamūd.835 If the name

Ṣāliḥ was chosen to replace John at a certain point in the history of transmission of the story, it is difficult to ascertain why and when. Alternatively, Ṣāliḥ might be a direct translation for “man of God,” considering the story of Paul and John might have converged with that of the Man of God, as mentioned above. In either case, this name choice clearly fits within the attempt to give the story an Arabo-Islamic character.

As Fīmyūn stood to pray, a tinnīn, a seven-horned snake, came towards him and when Fīmyūn saw it he cursed it and it died. Seeing the snake but not knowing what had happened to it and fearing for Fīmyūn’s safety, Ṣāliḥ could not contain himself and cried out: “Fīmyūn, a tinnīn is upon you!” He took no notice and went on with his prayers until he had ended them. Night had come and he departed. He knew that he had been recognized and Ṣāliḥ knew that he had seen him. So Ṣāliḥ said: “Fīmyūn, you know that I have never loved anything as I love you; I want to be always with you and go wherever you go.” He replied: “As you will. You know how I live and if you feel that you can bear the life well and good.

The serpent story in the Syriac version is longer, adorned with a speech Paul delivers to

John, emphasizing the power given by Christ to the disciples to overcome adversaries.836

833 Bosworth, History of al-Ṭabarī, 5:196 fn. 492. 834 Newby, “Coptic literary influence,” 25. 835 Andrew Rippin, “Ṣāliḥ,” in EI2. 836 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 38.

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They also recite ten sections of the Psalms together. The dialogue that takes place between them in this scene is heavily laden with allusions to biblical passages. Thereafter they become comrades on the path of Christ and decide to leave Edessa together, which Rabbula approves. Although this episode in the Syriac story is heavily edited and significantly shortened in the Islamic version, the serpent, and its role in manifesting John’s affection for Paul and the establishment of their companionship, are kept.

So Ṣāliḥ remained with him, and the people of the village were on the point of discovering his secret. For when a man suffering from a disease came in his way by chance Fīmyūn prayed for him and he would be cured; but if Fīmyūn was summoned to a sick man he would not go. Now one of the villagers had a son who was blind, and he asked about Fīmyūn and was told that he never came when he was sent for, but that he was a man who built houses for people for a wage. Thereupon the man took his son and put him in his room and threw a garment over him and went to Fīmyūn saying that he wanted him to do some work for him in his house and would he come and look at it, and they would agree on a price. Arrived at the house Fīmyūn asked what he wanted done, and after giving the details the man suddenly whisked off the covering from the boy and said, “O Fīmyūn, one of God’s creatures is in the state you see. So, pray for him.” Fīmyūn did so and the boy got up entirely healed.

This episode of tricking Fīmyūn into healing a blind child is not in the Syriac version.837

The closest parallel we have is the healing of a bed-ridden woman towards the end of the

Syriac story. The woman’s husband goes to the church where Paul dwells, and says to him

“Since I have heard that you are a day laborer and that you please those for whom you work, I have a job for you in my house. Come up and work for me, and I will give you your wage.”838 When Paul goes to the house of the man, the latter discloses the work: healing

837 Neither is there a similar episode in the story of the Man of God. 838 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 70.

255 the demon-possessed wife. Then Paul performs exorcism and heals the woman. In both the

Syriac and the Arabic version, the lay person requests a job from Paul as a day laborer, then reveals his real intention at the house. In the Arabic version, the demon-possessed wife becomes a blind son, and the man covers and uncovers the one who needs healing, increasing the dramatic impact of the story.839 We should also note that this healing episode in Paul and John takes place in Edessa, but towards the end of the narrative (when they return to Edessa after south Arabia). Despite the changes in the sequence and the emplotment, however, “holy man being tricked into healing a bed-ridden person” motif appears to have been kept between the Christian and the Islamic versions of the story.

Knowing that he had been recognized he left the village followed by Ṣāliḥ, and while they were walking through Syria they passed by a great tree and a man called from it, saying, “I’ve been expecting you and saying, ‘When is he coming?’ until I heard your voice and knew it was you. Don’t go until you have prayed over my grave for I am about to die.” He did die and Fīmyūn prayed over him until they buried him.

This is one of the significant passages in the story that clearly points to the story of Paul and John as the origin of that of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. Although the episode with the dendrite takes place much later in the original story, the Islamic version closely follows the Syriac one in emplotment.840 On their way back from south Arabia (note that Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in the version in the Sīra have not gone there yet), Paul and John reach a mountain, on top

839 For drama and storytelling aspects of hagiography, see my discussion of hagiodiegesis in the Introduction. 840 For an analysis of the story of the dendrite in the Syriac text, see Kyle Smith, “Dendrites and other standers in the History of the Exploits of Bishop Paul of Qanetos and Priest John of Edessa,” Hugoye 12 (2009): 117-134.

256 of which there was a man dwelling in a tree. Paul and John and the dendrite are all glad upon learning that they are all disciples of Christ, and they converse with each other telling their life stories. The dendrite asks them to stay with him for three days, for he anticipates his imminent death and asks them to bury him. The Islamic version, too, depicts the dendrite as waiting for Fīmyūn. The two men climb up the tree, bring down the dendrite and prepare a proper burial for him. After the dendrite episode Paul and John continue their adventures in Syria and northern Mesopotamia, whereas the Islamic version of the story inserts the Najrān episode here.

Then he left followed by Ṣāliḥ until they reached the land of the Arabs who attacked them, and a caravan carried them off and sold them in Najrān. At this time, the people of Najrān followed the religion of the Arabs worshipping a great palm-tree there. Every year they had a festival when they hung on the tree any fine garment they could find and women’s jewels. Then they sallied out and devoted the day to it. Fīmyūn was sold to one noble and Ṣāliḥ to another.

Paul and John, in the Syriac version, too, are attacked, taken captive, and brought to the

“land of the Ḥimyarites” by ṭayyāyē (Arabs).841 They are bound and put in a tent to be sacrificed for a cultic ritual. The ṭayyāyē living in the land of the Himyarites are depicted as tree-worshippers, which, according to the story, included human sacrifice (in the Islamic versions human sacrifice is omitted and tree worship is referred to as dīn al-ʿarab – religion of pre-Islamic Arabs). Before seeing the cultic tree, Paul performs numerous healings, all of which are also omitted in the Islamic version. Not surprisingly, the omitted sections are heavily interwoven with biblical imagery and an explicitly Christian discourse. For

841 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 50.

257 example, Paul, prior to baptizing a possessed young girl, says the following: “Our Lord

Jesus Christ, you came to humanity, my Lord, in order to free the children of Adam from the sin that bound them and from the curse that the earth received when Adam transgressed the commandment and when the evil one planted thorns and tares on it.”842 Upon hearing about their healing and other miracles, and that people began to visit them, the king is enraged, and he sends warriors to oppress their followers and kill the two holy men. Thus, they bring Paul and John to a place where there are many palm trees, one of which was tall and very lush among the others. Right before being killed, John learns that it was the god of the camp, and he petitions the king that their god should fight the god of Paul and John.

This healing, popularity among people, king’s rage and summoning of the two holy men are not in the Islamic version.

Now it happened that when Fīmyūn was praying earnestly at night in a house which his master had assigned to him the whole house was filled with light so that it shone as it were without a lamp. His master was amazed at the sight and asked him about his religion. Fīmyūn told him and said that they were in error; as for the palm- tree it could neither help nor hurt; and if he were to curse the tree in the name of God He would destroy it, for He was God Alone without companion. “Then do so,” said his master, “for if you do that we shall embrace your religion and abandon our present faith.” After purifying himself and performing two rakʿas, he invoked God against the tree and God sent a wind against it which tore it from its roots and cast it on the ground. Then the people of Najrān adopted his religion and he instructed them in the law of ʿĪsā b. Maryam. Afterwards they suffered the misfortunes which befell their co- religionists in every land. This was the origin of Christianity in Najrān in the land of the Arabs. Such is the report of Wahb b. Munabbih on the authority of the people of Najrān.

842 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 52.

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The conversion episode in the Syriac story of Paul and John begins with a conflict with the king of the Himyarites; whereas, Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ impress the master (sayyid) with their piety. First, Paul heals a young girl. The ones who see the miracle convert to Christianity, and Paul baptizes them. Then, the news of this miracle reach the king, who is enraged with what happened and sends warriors to seize the holy men and those who believe them, “both men and women, seventy souls in all.”843 The king takes Paul and John to the palm groove, where John challenges him to an ordeal. After the king agrees, John waves his hand, calls upon Jesus Christ (note that Fīmyūn calls for the help of “God alone without companion,” wa-huwa allāhu wāḥidun lā sharīka lahu), and uproots the tree. The king converts to

Christianity and builds a church for the holy men. Paul and John baptize people, ordain bishops and deacons, and leave for the “mountain of God” (where they would meet the dendrite).844 The sequence of conversion in Paul and John is significantly shorter in Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. The episode of people who convert to Christianity after the first miracle is not mentioned in the latter.

This part in the Syriac story might indicate intertextuality with stories in the

Christian tradition about persecution of Christians in Najrān. 70 souls gathered by the king, merely on account of their belief, is one of the episodes in the narratives about the persecution of Christians in Najrān. In Paul and John’s story the king is a pagan king, and he converts to Christianity at the end of a series of ordeals with the two holy men.845

Despite the significant differences between the two stories, the conversion episode in Paul

843 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 54. 844 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 56. 845 In the martyrological narratives, the king is a Jewish king, and he persecutes Christians by beheading some of them, and throwing majority into a fire pit.

259 and John is reminiscent of the story of Martyrs of Najrān in some respects. The king enraged by people’s piety and sending warriors to capture men and women (70 in number) reads like the beginning of a mass-persecution story. Although the persecution never happens, the rhetoric of the story of Paul and John, such as the cultic tree being “consumed as if by fire,” and John’s threatening of the king to “see all of the palm trees being burnt like this one,” reminds the readers of another “fire” episode that took place there, namely, the story of the Martyrs of Najrān. Being more than a mere allusion, this “context equivalence” between the story of Paul and John and that of the Martyrs of Najrān situates the two events at the same place, leading the audience/reader from the memory of one event to the other.846 Stephan Dӓhner uses the term “context equivalence” to analyze qur’ānic allusions and citations in political sermons in early Islamic period. He argues that orators

(or later historians who depicted them) included qur’ānic vocabulary and expressions, if not verbatim references, in their public speeches to equate their socio-political context to those described in the referred passages.847 This practice was not restricted to allusions between the scripture and public orations and was applied between hagiographical texts.

The stories alluded to in the story of Paul and John gives us a great example of this.

It is worth noting that according to the story of the Martyrs of Najrān, the first bishop of the place was also named Paul. This Paul, according to the story, lived and died in south Arabia, whereas our Paul (and John), after appointing priests and deacons, travel back to Palestine and Syria. Nevertheless, this part of the story of Paul and John might be

846 Stephan Dӓhner, “Context equivalence: A hitherto insufficiently studied use of the Qurʾān in political speeches from the early period of Islam,” in Ideas, Images and Methods of Portrayal: Insights into Classical Arabic Literature and Islam, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1-16 847 Ibid., 5-10.

260 in a literary conversation with the story of the Martyrs of Najrān. Perhaps this part was written to give a background of that bishop in the Martyrs of Najrān episode, or a background story in general with a namesake.848 Establishing the story of Paul and John as a metatext for a version of the story of the Martyrs of Najrān, however, is difficult. Another possibility is that this part in Paul and John serves as the counter-story of the Martyrs of

Najrān: first Paul and John converted the king and his people by uprooting and burning their cultic tree; then, Bishop Paul and his disciples were burned by a nonbeliever king.

To return to Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ: A significant detail in this episode is that Fīmyūn purifies himself and performs two rakʿas (prostrations) before uprooting the cultic tree. In the Syriac story, Paul and John do not perform any ritual before they destroy the tree, but, in the very next section when they go to the mountain of God, they kneel (burkā) there for five days and five nights. The Arabic version says that Fīmyūn performs two rakʿas, another interpolation in the story to attribute an Islamic resonance for the audience of the

Sīra.849 In fact, with this detail, in addition to the changes in their names (especially Ṣāliḥ being a name that is rare in pre-Islamic usage), and explicitly referring to the holy men as

848 Also note the story of two rabbis who travel to south Arabia, have a fire ordeal with the local fire worshippers, and convert them to Judaism. In this case the fire devours the idols of the pagans, and not burn the two holy men. 849 Bowing, kneeling, and prostration were common prayer rituals in the Christian communities in late antiquity, which continued in the Islamic tradition. In the latter, a rakʿa can refer to prostration (sajda) during ritual prayer (ṣalāt), or, more comprehensively, it can refer to the entire cycle that comprises standing, bowing, kneeling and prostration. That Fīmyūn performs two rakʿas does not seem to be coincidental, however. Ṣalāt in the Islamic tradition originally consisted of two rakʿas, and this number was retained for journeys and other informal prayers. Therefore, even though rakʿa might have semantically substituted the Syriac burkā, the prayer of Fīmyūn in this part of the story still probably sounded Islamic to the audience. See Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 73; Guy Monnot, “ṣalāt,” in EI2. The expression of “praying two rakʿas” was also used in qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā literature. For instance, Abraham and Jacob pray two rakʿas before making a supplication to God in Muḥmmad al-Kisāʾī’s (thirteenth c.) Qiṣaṣ al- anbiyā. Muḥmmad al-Kisāʾī, The Tales of the Prophets, trans. W. M. Thackston, Jr. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 143, 164.

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Muslims and their disciples as imāms,850 the story was given a clear Islamic resonance. At the very end Ibn Isḥāq reiterates that he is relating on the account of Wahb b. Munabbih.

Analyzing the social context of Wahb is essential for understanding both the transmission of the story from Christianity to Islam, and preservation of it in Islamic literature.

4.3. Ibn Isḥāq on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih

Ibn Isḥāq was born in Medina in the beginning of the eighth century. His grandfather, formerly a Christian, was a manumitted slave, who became a mawlā (client) during the early Islamic conquests in Iraq; his sons, one of which was Isḥāq (Ibn Isḥāq’s father), were transmitters of akhbār (reports).851 Montgomery Watt, in his analysis of the literary and oral sources used by Ibn Isḥāq in the Sīra, does not have any substantial information on biographical backgrounds of people Ibn Isḥāq narrated stories from.852 I find such brief prosopographical analysis essential in understanding the transmission of information, especially Christian hagiographical material. Ibn Isḥāq is known in Islamic historiography to have collected akhbār mostly on the authority of transmitters in Egypt and Iraq, a great majority of which were converts, mawlās and manumitted slaves.853

850 In fact, immediately after this story, Fīmyūn is referred to as a Muslim instructing people in the ways of Islam, and his young disciple as an imām. 851 Jones, “Ibn Isḥāḳ,” EI2; Newby, Making of the Last Prophet, 5-8. For mawlās (Arabic pl. mawāli) in early Islam, see Daniel Pipes, “Mawlas: Freed slaves and converts in early Islam,” in Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, ed. Robert Hoyland (Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 277-322. 852 W. Montgomery Watt, “The Materials Used by Ibn Ishaq,” in Historians of the Middle East, eds. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London; New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962), 23-34. 853 Jones, “Ibn Isḥāḳ,” EI2. He was sometimes reviled by later Muslims scholars for transmitting material from descendants of Jews and Christians. Watt, “Materials used by Ibn Ishaq,” 31-34.

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In the Sīra, Ibn Isḥāq reports the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ “on the authority of al-

Mughīra b. Abū Labīd, a freedman of al-Akhnas.” Al-Bukhārī mentions that al-Mughīra transmitted ḥadīth from Ibn Sīrīn, a renowned Baṣran ḥadīth scholar whose father was a manumitted slave of Anas b. Mālik (d. 709), an eminent Companion of Muhammad and a traditionist.854 In addition to his personal connections to converts as sources of historical information, Ibn Isḥāq was also a student of al-Zuhrī (d. 742), another significant ḥadīth scholar of the Medinan school. 855 Thus, Ibn Isḥāq’s access to the story can be contextualized within the wider circles of akhbār transmitters and traditionists of the early eighth century, a number of whom were previously Christian converts and servants, or descendants of these groups. Christian hagiographical traditions, among other cultural material, were possibly transmitted through these channels, and found new meaning, interpretation, and use.

In the isnād of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ that Ibn Isḥāq provides, the aforementioned Wahb b. Munabbih is cited as the origin of the story.856 As mentioned previousy, Wahb is known to have had access to numerous monastic libraries. Jack

Tannous demonstrates that in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages monasteries in the eastern Mediterranean functioned as education centers, in which voluminous manuscript production, translation, teaching, and transmission took place.857 It is worth noting that the

854 Al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-Ꜥilmīyya) bāb mughīra 1400; T. Fahd, “Ibn Sīrīn,” in EI2. 855 Stephen Judd, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads. Piety-minded Supporters of the Marwānid Caliphate (London; New York: Routledge, 2014), 52-61; note that MaꜤmar b. Rāshid (d. 770), the author of another eighth-century biography of Muhammad, was also a mawlā and a pupil of al-Zuhrī. Sean Anthony, The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muhammad (New York; London: New York University Press, 2014), xix. 856 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14; Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih,” in EI2. 857 Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 215-18.

263 three earliest (sixth c.) Syriac manuscripts that included the story of Paul and John, and the later ones, like the twelfth/thirteenth century copy at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of

Damascus, are voluminous manuscripts that also include the story of the Martyrs of Najrān, and the Life of the Man of God.858 Wahb was likely a participant of this early medieval monastic culture, and might have had access to one of these manuscripts. Wahb was of course not an exception to Muslim access to monasteries. Muslims are known to have frequently visited Christian monasteries, as prominently seen in the tenth-century Kitāb al- diyārāt by ʿAlī b. Muḥammad Shābushtī, a list of monasteries the author visited.859

Did Wahb read his sources in Arabic, or did he translate them from other languages? Duri, following Khoury, suggests that Wahb probably knew Hebrew and

Syriac.860 Thus, he might have had access to the Syriac story. This, however, does not eliminate the possibility that the story of Paul and John was translated into Arabic before

Wahb had access to it. Christians in the Near East used the Arabic language in literary production and liturgy starting from late-seventh century, as Sidney Griffith convincingly argues.861 A great corpus of biblical material was translated and circulating in Arabic in written or oral form by that time, and monastic libraries had voluminous works written in

Arabic. In the monasteries in Palestine, for instance, numerous saints’ lives were written in Arabic in the eighth century.862 Therefore, it is possible that the story of Paul and John

858 Arneson et al., Paul and John, 19-21; Sebastian Brock, et al., “Catalogue des manuscrits de la bibliotheque du Patriarcat Syrien Orthodoxe a Homs” PO 19 (1994), 612. 859 ʿAlī b. Muḥammad Shābushtī, Kitāb al-diyārāt [The Book of Monasteries], ed. George Awwad (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). 860 Duri, “Historic folklore,” 125; Khoury, Wahb, 1: 215ff. 861 Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 90, 111, 127, 129. 862 Sidney Griffith, “The monks of Palestine and the growth of Christian literature in Arabic,” Muslim World 78, no. 1 (1988): 6, 15; Mark Swanson, “Arabic Hagiography,” in ARCBH, 1:345.

264 was also translated into Arabic, and that Wahb had access to the text, although the extant manuscripts do not include an Arabic version of the story. Nevertheless, instead of merely searching for an urtext of the story in Arabic literature, one should also take into consideration the oral tradition and the widespread practice of storytelling in the late antique eastern Mediterranean, as extensively demonstrated in the Introduction and

Chapter 1. It is possible that Wahb heard a short version of the story, and both wrote it down and narrated it to other people. At the end of Ibn Isḥāq’s account, it is said that Wahb transmitted the story “from the people of Najrān,” and this note points at an oral tradition.

Whether Wahb encountered the shortened version of the story of Paul and John in

Arabic in a written or oral Christian source, or he translated it from Syriac and shortened it, is difficult to ascertain due to the dearth of Wahb’s surviving writings.863 Moreover, we do not know to what extent Wahb wrote the texts that are attributed to him in later Islamic scholarship, or whether he mostly recited his “books,” as opposed to writing them down.

The fact that many of his writings were transmitted by his family members complicates any discussion of authorship.864 Nevertheless, regarding his agency one might comfortably assume that even if there was already a shortened version of the story in Christian sources,

Wahb (or his immediate successors in transmitting the story) gave the story an Islamic character. After this transformation, the story served various roles in Islamic literary contexts, to which we now turn.

863 Particularly, the loss of Kitāb al-mulūk al-mutawwaja in which Wahb is reported to have narrated the legendary foundation history and possibly the faḍāʾil of his native land, is unfortunate, for it would have been a key document to shed light on the transmission of stories between Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. Nevertheless, extensive quotations from Wahb have been preserved in various works, such as Ibn Hishām’s Kitāb al-tījān. 864 “Family notes” are very important vessels of transmission, to which we will return. On this see Khalek, Damascus, 11-12, 42-43, 52, 150ff.

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4.4. Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in Context

4.4.a. As the precursors of the Qur’ānic People of the Trench according to Ibn Isḥāq

Ibn Isḥāq’s version of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ ends with the note that the people of

Najrān thus were converted to the “religion of Jesus, son of Mary, peace be upon him” (dīn

ʿĪsā b. Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām), using the standard mode of referring to Jesus in the

Islamic tradition.865 The very last sentence of the story is: “afterwards they suffered the misfortunes (aḥdāth) which befell their co-religionists in every land.” Bosworth, in his translation of the story in the Tārīkh of al-Ṭabarī suggests that the word aḥdāth here could be translated as “innovations” rather than “misfortunes, events, happenings.”866 This could mean that their religion was corrupted like in other Christian communities, especially if one considers that at the beginning of the story Ibn Isḥāq states that “In Najrān there were some people who held the religion of ʿĪsā b. Maryam, a virtuous and upright people who followed the Gospel.”867 Accordingly, Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ were among Jesus’ followers whose religion had remained uncorrupted. Guillaume, on the other hand, states that the phrase “remnants of the people of ʿIsa’s religion” does not necessarily mean “upholders of an uncorrupted Christianity.”868 If the word instead means “events, happenings” here, the statement could also be a metatextual reference to the Martyrs of Najrān. As Watt, Cook

865 G. C. Anawati, “ʿĪsā,” in EI2; in the Qur’ān 3:40, 4:169, 19:35. 866 Bosworth, History of al-Ṭabarī, 5:199 fn. 499. 867 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14; also quoted by Ṭabarī in his Tārīkh, Bosworth, History of al-Ṭabarī, 5:192. 868 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14 fn. 3.

266 and Sizgorich demonstrate, the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, and the story of Fīmyūn’s

“Muslim” disciple ʿAbdallah b. al-Thāmir (also known as the story of a king, sorcerer, monk and a youth), have generally been incorporated into the exegetical tradition of the qur’ānic chapter sūrat al-burūj, Q85:4-8, which mentions a group of people named aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd (People of the Trench).869

Watt categorizes these stories in the Sīra as “tafsīr material.” 870 David Cook similarly argues that the two stories were used as “enveloping stories” to give background information about the episode that is alluded to in the Qur’ān. Their observations are due to the fact that Ibn Isḥāq quotes these qur’ānic verses after the story of ʿAbdallah b. al-

Thāmir (Fīmyūn’s disciple), reminding the readers of the events that befell the believing

Christians in south Arabia, and connecting it to the qur’ānic People of the Trench. Thus, the Sīra becomes a metatext for both the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, and the Qur’ān, commenting on both texts.871 The hagiographical narrative is thus connected to the qur’ānic time frame, contextualizing an otherwise vague allusion. Let us take a closer look at the qur’ānic episode and its conversations with the broader hagiographical traditions of late antiquity.

869 Watt, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd;” R. Paret, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” in EI2; David Cook, “The aṣḥāb al- ukhdūd: History and ḥadīth in a martyrological sequence,” JSAI 34 (2008): 125-148; Thomas Sizgorich, “”Become infidels or we will throw you into the fire’: The Martyrs of Najrān in early Muslim historiography, hagiography and qurʾānic exegesis,” in Writing ‘True Stories’, ed. Papaconstantinou, 136ff. 870 Our story also might fall under what Watt calls “anecdotes” (mostly invented stories to support particular theological or hagiographical viewpoints, according to his definition). Regardless of what category of source material we may decide to assign the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ to, Watt’s categorization proves to be not fully functional. The category “anecdote” is too generic, and the use of the term “invention” assumes a sharp separation between fiction and historicity in medieval historiography, which most of the time did not exist. 871 Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory, 81.

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Cursed were the companions of the trench, [containing] the fire full of fuel, when they were sitting near it, and they, to what they were doing against the believers, were witnesses. And they resented them not except because they believed in Allah, the Exalted in Might, the Praiseworthy, to whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. And Allah, over all things, is Witness. Indeed, those who have tortured the believing men and believing women and then have not repented will have the punishment of Hell, and they will have the punishment of the Burning Fire. (Q85:4-10)

These seven verses in the sūra mention two groups of people: Those who resent believers for their faith in God and persecute them by throwing them into fire (or merely sitting by the fire watching the believers tortured), and those who were thrown into a fire pit due to their unwavering faith. The aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd mentioned in the fourth verse is generally interpreted by medieval and modern scholars as the makers of the trench (the persecutors).

But the verb “qutila” could also be translated as “slain.”872 Therefore, the term “People of the Trench” could be referring to the ones thrown into the fire pit, as David Cook points out.873 Thus, the only information the Qur’ān gives is these two groups of people, and a fire pit. The rest of the sūra does not reveal any further indication regarding the provenance or time frame for the People of the Trench. The verses exhort about God’s witnessing everything and the severity of His punishment for those who mistreat believers.

Considering only these seven verses, it is difficult to tell whether a specific story is being alluded to by the episode of the People of the Trench. Believers persecuted by fire is a common hagiographical theme found in both biblical and extra-biblical literature. The

872 Q85:4 qutila aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd. For an introduction to qur’ānic passive voice see Mustansir Mir, “Passives in the Qur’ān: Preliminary Notes,” in Literary Heritage of Classical Islam. Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of James A. Bellamy, ed. Mustansir Mir (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1993), 169-79. 873 Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” 128.

268 three youths thrown into the fiery furnace in the Book of Daniel,874 the martyrdom of

Polycarp of Smyrna (d. ca.160),875 of Shmona, Guria and Habib in Edessa,876 the martyrs of Najrān,877 are among the better-known stories in which believers are thrown into fire due to their belief in God. The qur’ānic People of the Trench does not prominently echo any of these narratives from the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Christian hagiography, however, appears to have provided further material for exegetes for the interpretation and contextualization of these verses and the People of the

Trench. The Tafsīr of Ibn ʿAbbās states that these verses are about the slaughter of

“believers” in Najrān by the king Dhū al-Nuwās.878 Ibn ʿAbbās does not give a long narrative. He says that people in Najrān tortured and killed the believers in fire, having forced them into their religion. Their king was named Yūsuf who was referred to as Dhū al-Nuwās. The believers refused to denounce their faith and accepted their torments.

Despite the briefness of the account, Ibn ʿAbbās’s association of the episode of the People of the Trench with the Martyrs of Najrān is explicit.

Other exegetes adopted a different, longer narrative exegesis for these verses: As mentioned earlier, the story of Fīmyūn’s “Muslim” disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir was often incorporated into the exegetical tradition of the qur’ānic People of the Trench. This story is about a young boy who is sent to a magician by his parents to learn sorcery. He encounters a monk on his way (Ibn Hishām, in his edition of the Sīra, says that this monk

874 Dan. 3:1-30 875 Gerard Moultrie, The Martyrdom of S. Polycarp (London: Joseph Masters, 1865). 876 Francis Crawford Burkitt, Acts of the Edessan Martyrs Guria and Shmona, and Habib and the Story of their Deliverance of Euphemia (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007). 877 An extensive list of sources and studies on this story is given below. 878 Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 507.

269 was Fīmyūn), and instead of going to the magician, he frequents the monk, hiding his visits from his family on the advice of the monk. ʿAbdallāh performs miracles and starts converting people to Christianity. Enraged by this, the king tries to kill the child. None of the methods he tries works, however. Finally, the king superficially converts to

Christianity, and only then could he kill the child. This story became the main narrative framework for the exegesis of the qur’ānic People of the Trench, although there are alternative exegetical traditions.879 The fact that the king extensively tortures the believing child, and eventually other Christians being also persecuted in the story, resulted in the association of this story with the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najrān, although no direct literary connection can be established between the two narratives.

In Christian texts, the story of the Martyrs of Najrān has been preserved in three closely related sources: The Letter of Simeon of Bēth Arshām,880 the Martyrdom of Arethas

879 Some medieval historians, like al-Ṭabarī, showed ambivalence towards the account, stating that ʿAbdallāh was the founder of the religion in Najrān and Dhū Nuwās came after him (another king had killed ʿAbdallāh before him), and he persecuted Christians after the time of ʿAbdallāh. Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” 129. 880 Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis, 1:364-79; “Syriac Letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham,” AMS 1 (1890): 372-397; Italian-Syriac: Ignazio Guidi, “La Lettera di Simeone viscovo di Beth-Arsam sopra I martiri Omeriti,” Reale Accademia dei Lincei (Anno CCLXXVIII 1880-1881): Memorie della Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filogiche, 3rd series, 7 (1881): 471-514; English translation in Arthur Jeffery, “Three documents on the history of Christianity in south Arabia,” Anglican Theological Review 27, no. 3 (1945): 195-205.

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(Hārith),881 and the Book of the Himyarites.882 The letter is written by Bishop Simeon (sixth c.) addressing his namesake Bishop Simeon of Gabbula. It starts with the narrative of

Simeon’s travel to the camp of the Ghassanid king Mundhīr (r. 569-581). He informs his reader that while they were at the camp, Mundhīr received a letter from the Jewish king

(possibly Joseph - Dhū Nuwās) in south Arabia about how he persecuted Christians who refused to deny Christ. The letter of the Jewish king, which Simeon quotes in length, includes an account of the exhumation of the deceased bishop Paul’s bones, a speech of the Christian noblewoman Rhumi, and the report of how she and her daughters were martyred. Simeon’s letter quotes from another informant from south Arabia about the martyrdom of King Arethas, Rhumi’s husband, and many other members of the Christian community in Najrān. The letter at the end gives an account of a Christian child, who,

881 “Arethas,” BHO, 99-106 (pp. 24-26); Greek: J. Fr. Boissonade, ed., Anecdota Graeca 5 (1833): 1-62; Latin: E. Carpentier, trans., “Martyrium Sancti Arethae et Sociorum in Civitate Negran,” Acta Sanctorum: Octobris 10 (1869): 721-62; Arabic: Alessandro Bausi and Alessandro Gori, ed. and trans., Tradizioni orientali del “Martirio di Areta”: La prima recensione arabe e la versione etipica: Edizione critica e traduzione, Quaderni di semitistica 27 (Florence: Dopartmento di linguistica, Università di Firenze, 2006), 30-88, 31-89. There are also Ethiopic, Armenian and Georgian versions. General works on this martyrdom episode: Irfan Shahīd, The Martyrs of Najran: New Documents (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1971); Jaques Ryckmans, “A confrontation of the main hagiographic accounts of the Najrān persecution,” in Arabian Studies in Honor of Mahmoud Ghul: Symposium at Yarmouk University, December 8- 11, 1984, ed. Moawiyah M. Ibrahim (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), 113-33; Irfan Shahīd, “The Martyrs of Najran: Further reflections,” Le Muséon 103, no. 1-2 (1990): 151-3; Marina Detoraki, ed., Le martyre de Saint Aréthas et de ses compagnons, Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 27, Le Massacre de Najran 1 (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilization de Byzance, 2007); Joëlle Beaucamp, Françoise Briquel- Chatonnet, and Christian Julien Robin, eds., Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et Vie siècles: Regards croisés sur les sources, Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 32, Le Massacre de Najran 2 (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilization de Byzance, 2010). 882 Axel Moberg, The Book of the Ḥimyarites: Fragments of a Hitherto Unknown Syriac Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924); Irfan Shahīd, “The Book of the Himyarites: Authorship and authenticity,” Le Muséon 76, no. 3-4 (1963): 349-62.

271 despite the Jewish king’s attempt to convert him to Judaism, says he chose to die. The child’s mother is beheaded, but the child’s faith is unclear in the letter.

Simeon’s letter has been copied by many ancient historians, resulting in a complex transmission history of the document, and the preservation of the memory of the martyrs.

John of Ephesus (sixth c.) quotes the letter in full, and this was preserved in the Chronicle of Zuqnin, by Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell Mahre (eighth c.). 883 It is also found in the

Ecclesiastical History of Pseudo-Zachariah of Mytilene (sixth c.). As Irfan Shahīd demonstrates, the letter had various recensions varying in detail.884

The Martyrdom of Arethas is a narrative of the Martyrs of Najrān with a focus on the martyrdom of King Arethas. Axel Moberg states that it was based on the Book of the

Himyarites, disagreeing with Nöldeke and Guidi who identify the source of the Acta as the

Letter of Simeon.885 Shahīd, along similar lines, claims that it was written by the same

Simeon of Bēth Arshām. The Book of the Himyarites is the most extensive of the three sources, and possibly a source for the previous two of them.886 It is preserved in a tenth- century manuscript, although was originally written much earlier, possibly shortly after the second Abyssinian expedition into Yemen in 525, relying mostly on oral narratives of eye witnesses. The index of the book is preserved, although the majority of the sections are fragmented. It begins with ethnographical information about south Arabia, and the Jewish

883 Ps.-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle of Zuqnin, 53; The Chronicle of ps.-Zachariah Rhetor, Church and War in Late Antiquity, ed. Geoffrey Greatrex, translated from Syriac and Arabic sources by Robert R. Phenix and Cornella B. Horn, with introductory material by Sebastian P. Brock and Witold Witakowski (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 8.3. 884 Shahīd, Martyrs of Najran, 17-30. 885 Moberg, Book of the Himyarites, xxvi-xxxvi. 886 Moberg, Book of the Himyarites, lxiv.

272 and Christian religious communities there. It narrates the first Abyssinian intervention in south Arabia, and the Jewish King Dhū Nuwās’ persecution of Christians in Zafar, Najrān, and other towns. After a long account of individual martyrs and other persecutions under

Dhū Nuwās, the Book of the Himyarites narrates the second Abyssinian expedition to

Himyar under the Christian King Kaleb, his appointing a Christian king for Himyar and return to Abyssinia.

No section of the Book of the Himyarites, as far as one can gather from the preserved parts, narrates a story similar to the Islamic story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir.

There is a story about the son of an aristocrat, ʿAbdallāh b. Afʿū.887 Despite being a namesake, he does not do any of the things ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir does, nor is he martyred at the end. ʿAbdallāh in the Book of the Himyarites is mostly concerned about identification of the graves of the martyred Christians in Najrān. Despite the lack of a direct narrative relation, some important details surrounding the story in the Islamic tradition, as Moberg notes, show similarity with the information given in the Book of the Himyarites.888 Dhū

Nuwās’ conversion to Judaism, his persecution of Christians in a fire pit while crucifying some of them, and throwing himself into the sea upon his defeat are among the motifs that put the Book of the Himyarites in closer connection to the Islamic tradition, for many of them are not found in the Letter or the Acta.

Multiple versions of the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir circulated in Islamic literature, as an enveloping story for the qur’ānic People of the Trench. It appears in exegetical works, such as those of Muqātil b. Sulaymān (eighth c.) and al-Ṭabarī (ninth c.),

887 He was also one of the informants of the author. Moberg, Book of the Himyarites, cxvcxvii. 888 Moberg, Book of the Himyarites, xliii-xliv.

273 as well as in other texts, the aforementioned Sīra (a biography of Muhammad) of Ibn Ishāq

(eighth c.), Maghāzi (expeditions of Muhammad) of Maʿmar b. Rāshid (eighth c.),

Muṣannaf (ḥadīth collection) and Tafsīr of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanʿānī (ninth c.), Ṣaḥīḥ

(ḥadīth collection) of Muslim (ninth c.), and al-Bidāya wal-nihāya (universal history) of

Ibn Kathīr (fourteenth c.), to name a few.889

Despite the long transmission history of the story in Islamic literature, and some arbitrary connections of it to the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najrān, there are no clear indications that the persecution of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir was an allusion to the Martyrs of Najrān. In fact, Cook connects the story to Indian legends.890 In Ibn ʿAbbās’ Tafsīr, it is said that the People of the Trench might be from Mosul.891 And in a Persian version of the story in the Cambridge Anonymous Tafsīr, Dhū Nuwās is said to be either in Iraq or in

Najrān.892 Despite the ambiguity of the place in which the events took place, however, many exegetes who had the knowledge of the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najrān made the connection between the Christian tradition and the qur’ānic episode. Some later

Islamic versions of the story of ʿAbdallāh appear to be modified in light of Christian hagiography.

889 Thomas Sizgorich’s article “Become infidels” focuses on Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr for the analysis of the story in Islamic literature. Sean W. Anthony, ed. and trans, The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muḥammad (New York; London: New York University Press, 2014), 160-165. For some examples of the exegesis of the People of the Trench that involves the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir, see Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr, 3:469; Muhammad Shukrī al-Zāwītī, ed., Tafsīr al- Ḍaḥḥāk [eighth c.] (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1999), 2:950; Aḥmad Farīd, ed., Tafsīr Ibn Wahab [tenth c.] (Beirut: Manshurāt Muhammad ꜤAlī Bayḍūn, Dār al-kutub al-Ꜥilmīyya, 2003), 2:488; Ibn Kathīr, Bidāya, 2:129. 890 Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” 144. 891 Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 507. 892 Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” 137.

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In the ninth-century, the Iranian polymath Abū Ḥanīfa al-Dīnawarī (d. 895), for instance, in al-Akhbār al-ṭiwāl, presented ʿAbdallāh b. al-Tāmir as the king of Najrān.893

This is reminiscent of Arethas being the king in the Christian story. In al-Dīnawarī’s version he is beheaded, like Arethas, while other Christians were burned in ditches.894 The latter is a historiographical work that embeds Islamic history in an Iranian-centered chronology.895 The story of ʿAbdallāh is placed as part of the military history of south

Arabia, within a genealogy of Persian kings, as part of the account of Dhū Nuwās’s reign and defeat. Technically, this is not an exegetical work, but the story is given exegetical character since al-Dīnawarī explicitly connects this narrative to the Qur’ān with the note

“and they are the People of the Trench whom God, great is His name, mentioned in the

Qur’ān.”896

Al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1036), similarly, has a shorter version of the story in his Qiṣaṣ al- anbiyā,897 in which a mother and three of her children are thrown into fire, similar to Rhumi and her daughters in the Syriac tradition.898 The crucifixion of the youth (ʿAbdallāh b. al-

Thāmir) at the end of the Islamic story also reminds the audience of the Martyrs of Najrān, many of whom were crucified according to the story.899 Thus, although in early Islamic

893 “Al-Tāmir” is spelled differently in this text, but it could be an editorial mistake, and does not necessarily point at a different version. 894 Ibid., 136; al-Dīnawarī, al-Akhbār al-ṭiwāl [General History] (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al- ʿilmīyya, 2001), 109-110. 895 B. Lewin, “al-Dīnawarī,” in EI2. 896 al-Dīnawarī, Akhbār, 110. 897 al-Thaʿlabī gives different versions of the story in his Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā, 728-732. 898 In some Persian versions, David Cook says, the story was mixed with that of Daniel and his companions in the fiery furnace, Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd,” 137; cf. Daniel 3. 899 Moberg, Book of the Himyarites, cix.

275 literature the story was somewhat confusing for its claimed exegetical value, later Muslim historians and exegetes attempted to clarify the connection between the qur’ānic People of the Trench and ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir with the help of Christian hagiography.

Exegetical traditions of qur’ānic verses are elongated processes, within which narrative frames for verses were altered constantly.900 In the case of sūrat al-burūj and the

People of the Trench, this clarification was partly done through adapting motifs from the story of the Martyrs of Najrān. The story of Fīmyūn’s disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir, in this process, was expanded over a long period of time to include motifs from Christian hagiography, by those exegetes who argued that the qur’ānic People of the Trench were the Christian Martyrs of Najrān.

A teleological God-centered model of history, which depicts pre-Islamic monotheistic religions as precursors of Islam as a result of God’s divine plan was a major aspect of qur’ānic exegesis and Islamic historiography broadly. 901 Stories of ancient prophets and saints were often employed in Islamic literature for exegetical purposes, filling in the lacunae of information about the events the Qur’ān alludes to. Participating in this school of thought, with the prophetic genealogy from Adam to Muhammad, and a brief history of Yemen, Ibn Isḥāq lays out the historical current that culminates with

Muhammad’s prophethood and the qur’ānic revelation in the Sīra.902 With rhetorical tools, prophets become Muhammad’s precursors, and particular events having occurred during the reigns of Yemeni kings become contexts of certain qur’ānic verses. Thus, Fīmyūn and

900 Cook, “aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd;” David Cook, “Prophet Muḥammad, Labīd al-Yahūdī and the commentaries to sūra 113,” JSS 11, no. 2 (2000): 323-345. 901 Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 129, 135. For historicizing legitimacy, see Donner, Islamic Origins, 111-22. 902 Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 45; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 129, 135.

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Ṣāliḥ in the context of the Sīra are associated with the qur’ānic People of the Trench, as the latter’s precursors. The story of their disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir often accompanied the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, and was expanded in light of Christian hagiography, towards developing a broader, a more historical context for the qur’ānic

People of the Trench. Thus, when we see the two stories together in Islamic literature, it generally gives an exegetical reorientation of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. However, in many other literary contexts the latter story was not used for qur’ānic hermeneutics, and to these contexts we now turn.

4.4.b. Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh

Al-Ṭabarī is one of the transmitters of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in Islamic literature.

In his voluminous universal history, Tārīkh al-rusul wal-mulūk, he gives the story in the volume “Holders of Power after Ardashīr b. Bābak.” In the section on the history of Yemen, al-Ṭabarī gives an account of the kings of Himyarites until the Abyssinian and Persian invasion of the region in the sixth century. As he narrates the reign of the last king Dhū

Nuwās, who had converted to Judaism, al-Ṭabarī inserts the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, interfering with the historical sequence. The story appears to be a background information for more important events according to al-Ṭabarī, namely the conquest of south Arabia by

Abyssinians while Himyar was ruled by a Jewish king, who persecuted Christians.

Al-Ṭabarī narrates Ibn Isḥāq’s version of the story, with minor differences in wording. After Ibn Isḥāq, he gives Salamah and Ibn Ḥumayd in the chain of transmission.903 Like Ibn Isḥāq, he also gives the story of ʿAbdallah b. al-Thāmir after the

903 Bosworth, History of al-Ṭabarī, 5:195.

277 story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. And after this, he reminds his readers that it was Dhū Nuwās who dug a trench to persecute ʿAbdallah and his people (before the Abyssinian invasion).

He gives multiple accounts and interpretations of this persecution, and only in one of them he connects it to the exegesis of the qur’ānic verses Q85:4-8. Although al-Ṭabarī multiple times repeats that Dhū Nuwās dug a trench and burned some of the Christians in it, he only has one brief reference to the said verses. Therefore, the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ does not appear as a strongly exegetical episode in his representation. The story is used for its historical value, to provide a more extensive account of the history of south Arabia.

Al-Ṭabarī’s emphasis on the story for its historiographical value is apparent once we look at his other works. In al-Ṭabarī’s exegesis of sūrat al-burūj in his Tafsīr, the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ is not included, although he includes the story of ʿAbdallah b. al-

Thāmir and the latter’s community being persecuted in a pit of fire. Therefore, it is likely that al-Ṭabarī did not directly associate the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ with the exegetical tradition of the qur’ānic People of the Trench.904 Thus, Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ should be treated separately from their disciple ʿAbdallah b. al-Thāmir for their respective semiotic values.

The former certainly had a wider perception history, whereas the latter appears to have stayed strictly within the boundaries of qur’ānic exegesis.

This distinction was sustained by later historians and exegetes. Ibn Kathīr, a celebrated fourteenth-century ḥadīth scholar and historian in Syria, for example, also uses the story in his voluminous universal history al-Bidāya wal-nihāya.905 This is a work on

Islamic history, narrating the creation of the world, history of pre-Islamic Arabia,

904 Note that he included isrā’īliyyāt material in the exegesis of other qur’ānic chapters. 905 H. Laoust, “Ibn Kathīr,” in EI2.

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Muhammad’s lifetime, caliphate through the Mamluk period (the author’s time-period), and ends with the final judgement. Bidāya fits within the tradition of Islamic universal history, especially for having extensively used preceding universal histories like that of al-

Ṭabarī. It is also a significant pro-Syrian, semi-hagiographical local history of Damascus, where Ibn Kathīr studied, served the local government as a member of the scholarly community, and passed away. It is his most significant work, created in an era in which much of Islamic scholarship and intellectual output was imprinted by dynastic rivalries, sunnī-shīʿī controversies, and external threats like the Crusaders and the Mongols.906 Ibn

Kathīr has a strong pro-sunnī agenda for the Islamic section of his work, as few scholars have argued before.907 His account on the pre-Islamic events are naturally less politically- motivated. And even though he used al-Ṭabarī’s Tārīkh with caution, adapting it to his own methodology and agenda, he seems to have fully quoted the latter for the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ.

The chapters of Bidāya are titled as qiṣṣa (story), khabar (report) and the like, and they vary in length and form of content. The story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ is found in the chapter where Ibn Kathīr gives an account of the conflicts between Himyarite and Axumite kingdoms.908 The chapter is entitled “Lakhnīʿa, the earing-wearer, usurping rule over

Yemen”.909 The very next section is about the king of Yemen marching into Ethiopia and

Sudan. The story of Christianization of south Arabia is inserted within these two martial

906 Aaron Hagler, “Sapping the narrative: Ibn Kathīr’s account of the shūrā of ʿUthman in Kitāb al-bidāya wal-nihāya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 303. 907 Ibid., 305-6. 908 Ibn Kathīr, Bidāya, 2:168. 909 wuthūb lakhnīʿa dhī shanātir ʿalā malik al-yaman

279 episodes. Ibn Kathīr appears to have aimed at giving an extensive historical account of the events he mentioned in his universal history. The story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, like many other stories he included in his work, provided historical information. He does not comment on the historicity of the account. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Bidāya Ibn Kathīr says he carefully avoided sources like qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā and isrā’īliyyāt, if any source was suspected to have been corrupted. Therefore, he must have deemed the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ among those historically reliable.

It is worth noting that Ibn Kathīr has another chapter in this volume dedicated to the People of the Trench,910 where he gives the abovementioned story of ʿAbdallah b. al-

Thāmir.911 This is another manifestation of the semiotic separation of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ from the exegesis of the People of the Trench. In his exegesis of sūrat al-burūj, like al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr does not mention the story of Fīmyūn. He only gives the story of the king, sorcerer and the young boy - ʿAbdallah b. al-Thāmir. Thus, for Muslim scholars, the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ was not merely “tafsīr material.” In universal historiographical works, the two holy men were presented as pre-Islamic Muslim holy men, not necessarily with a connection to the qur’ānic People of the Trench. They were members of the eternal Muslim community (umma).

4.4.c. Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ as faḍā’il of Najrān in Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān

Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, a manumitted slave and renowned scholar in the 13th century, included the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in his geographical-lexicographical work, Muʿjam al-buldān.

910 qiṣṣa aṣḥāb al-ukhdūd 911 Ibn Kathīr, Bidāya, 2:129.

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The dictionary comprises of entries on towns, cities and regions, and Yāqūt gives information about the history, literature, important individuals and other characteristics of each place. He completed the dictionary in the year 1228 for the library of his patron Ibn al-Qifṭī, head of the office of finances in Aleppo, a prolific scholar himself.912 Although he conceptualized the Muʿjam before meeting Ibn al-Qifṭī, the latter’s patronage made the finalization of the work possible.

Yāqūt gives the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in his entry for “Najrān,” and narrates the full account of Ibn Isḥāq.913 According to the map produced by R. Sellheim, he never went to south Arabia.914 The libraries he visited during his scholarly career, however, must have enabled him to fill in the gaps of information he had not the chance to gather during his travels. Ibn al-Qifṭī’s own writings on the history of Yemen must have also been among his sources. Despite the difficulty in identifying Yāqūt’s source for Ibn Isḥāq’s version of the story, the latter sufficed as information on Najrān for him.

Yāqūt’s antiquarianism, however, is not sufficient for contextualizing the story in the Muʿjam. He used the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ for encomiastic purposes, to praise

Najrān, presenting the two Christian holy men as wonders and excellences particular to that region. As shown in the previous chapter, many hagiographical stories of pre-Islamic saints were incorporated into Islamic literature as praises of particular towns and regions, as merits and religious cultural heritage of those places. Yāqūt’s work is not explicitly titled as faḍā’il. Moreover, a lexicographical work does more than serve as a panegyric.

912 Claude Gilliot, “Yāqūt al-Rūmī,” in EI2; A. Dietrich, “Ibn al-Ḳifṭī,” in EI2. 913 Yāqūt, Muʿjam, 5:266. 914 R. Sellheim, “Neue Materialen zur Biographie des Yāqūt,” in Forschungen und Fortschritte der Katalogisierung der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, ed. W. Voigt (Wiesbaden, 1966).

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Nevertheless, Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ were presented as the excellent qualities of the region of

Najrān in the Muʿjam. Thus, our author participates in a tradition of praising south Arabian antiquities starting from the milieu of Wahb b. Munabbih, the first transmitter of the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. Although personal or communal interests in such a representation shifted over time, the mode of representation remained.

In the absence of Wahb’s works it is difficult to tell how his presentation of this story compares to those of other authors. Nevertheless, in the Sīra one sees that it was a highly valued story about the pious and virtuous past of south Arabia. Considering that both Ibn Isḥāq and the editor of his work Ibn Hishām have personal connections to south

Arabia, it is natural that, besides the other roles the story fulfilled in the Sīra (like exegesis), it also was a source of local pride for these authors. Caliph ʿUmar b. Khaṭṭāb’s veneration of the unearthed martyr (a note given at the end of the two stories in the Sīra), reveals the attempt to place south Arabian piety and sanctity on a par with northern, Qurashī, claims to sanctity. As Hanaoka demonstrates for Persian historiography, historians in the peripheral regions often engaged in a conversation with the center through their writings.915

In this process, they often emphasized merits and excellences of their local regions through portrayals of sanctity attributed to those places. The story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ functioned as such for a long genealogy of authors.

Neither Yāqūt nor Ibn al-Qiftī, however, had ancestral roots in south Arabia or the

Ḥijāz. Thus, theirs appear to be a scholarly interest in the heritage of the Islamic world in general, and preserving an inventory of its history, culture and literature. By the twelfth century, the story seems to have taken out of the context of early Islamic dynastic rivalries.

915 Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 3-6.

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Its value as one of the faḍā’il attributed to south Arabia, however, was unquestionably continuing. As Natalia Lozovsky extensively argues, medieval geography was often a scholarly practice of collecting knowledge about the created world and nature, as a means to support the knowledge about divine things and the scripture (divine past).916 Yāqūt’s endeavor fits in this frame and understanding of geography in the Middle Ages, if in the

Islamic context: a study of place and time as a tool for gaining knowledge about the creation and the divine past. In this, the two Christian holy men become significant seminal landmarks in south Arabia reflecting the sacred history of the place in an Islamic framework.

4.4.d. Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ for didactic exhortation in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Muḥāḍarat al-abrār Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) Muḥāḍarat al-abrār wa-musāmarat al-akhyār, a sufi collection of biographical notes and stories of prophets and saints, includes the story of Fīmyūn and

Ṣāliḥ.917 The story of the two holy men is taken out of its historical context, and reoriented towards a didactic purpose, namely, exhorting the reader on piety and perseverance. Ibn al-ʿArabī was among the most prominent sufi scholars in the Middle Ages.918 He started his education and career in Spain and North Africa, and traveled thoroughly in Arabia,

Syria, and Asia Minor, among other places. He had scholarly and family connections to significant philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders of his time. He was a prolific writer, to whom some four hundred works have been attributed.

916 Natalia Lozovsky, “The Earth is Our Book:” Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400-1000 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 9ff. 917 Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat, 249-252. 918 A. Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī,” in EI2.

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The Muḥāḍarat is one of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s numerous works on the tenets of sufism, albeit being among the less-cited.919 It is a two-volume collection of anecdotes and wisdom sayings from prophets and sages. In this sequence of anecdotes, he gives the story of

Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, under the title “Story (khabar) of Faymiyūn and his acts of devotion

(ʿibādātihi) and what happened to him.” Ibn al-ʿArabī narrates from Ibn Isḥāq, providing a verbatim copy of the version of the story in the Sīra, with a few minor variations. After the story, Ibn al-ʿArabī has two brief explicatory notes.920 First, he explains a verb. He says that “fa-jaʿfathā,” the action the wind that God sent did to the cultic tree in the story (the feminine ending of the verb indicating the tree), meant “fa-qalaʿathā,” that is, “uprooted it.” Secondly, he explains the term “ʿila ʿawla,” used to describe Ṣāliḥ’s reaction when he saw a snake coming upon Fīmyūn, that is, could not hold himself.921 Through a couplet from the renowned eighth-century poet al-Farazdaq, 922 Ibn al-ʿArabī notes: “so, the meaning of the term is someone who is overwhelmed, and his steadfastness and patience were conquered.”923

Ibn al-ʿArabī used the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ for its exhortative value. In this representation, the two holy men are not only two members of the pre-Muhammad believers, but are also placed in a community of sufis. They exhort Ibn al-ʿArabī’s readers on generic concepts such as piety and perseverance. This reorientation is done through two strategies: 1) The author took the story out of its historical context, de-emphasizing its

919 Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī”, EI2. 920 Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat, 252. 921 Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat, 250. 922 R. Blachère, “al-Farazdaḳ,” in EI2. 923 In the story the term is used to refer to how Ṣāliḥ could not contain himself, and cried out loudly when he saw that Fīmyūn was in danger.

284 connection to south Arabia, and the history of Christianity and paganism. 2) With the note he provided, he emphasized the semiotic value of the story. The section ends with a prominent, poetic statement on perseverance and strength, even under the circumstances of defeat. Thus, in this representation, Fīmyūn became an embodiment of these virtues, while preserving his Christian identity.

We have seen earlier examples of such didactic representations of Christians in

Islamic literature with the example of Jesus being represented as an ascetic in a multitude of Islamic works, and St. Antony in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s (ninth c.) Wajal. The current example shows the continuation of that practice in the thirteenth century in sufi literature.

In these and such examples, Christian saints, like Antony, Fīmyūn, Ṣāliḥ, as well as more prominent figures like Jesus, despite staying as Christians, were integrated into a community of true believers as instructors on Islamic concepts of piety, sanctity, and asceticism. Their religious affiliations are not erased; they stay as Christians. Yet, this aspect of their personas is not elaborated on, and thus becomes tangential. The representation of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in the Muḥāḍarat thus participates in a long tradition of representing Christian saints as instructors on asceticism and mysticism in Islamic literature.

As for Ibn al-ʿArabī’s access to the story, at the beginning of the work he says: “We relate from the account (ḥadīth) of Ibn Isḥāq.”924 The latter was one of the 45 sources of

Ibn al-ʿArabī, according to the list of sources and chains of transmission he provides.925

Since the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ are reported here on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq, it is

924 Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat, 18. 925 Ibn al-ʿArabī, Muḥāḍarat, 18-32.

285 tenable to argue that Ibn al-ʿArabī used a copy of the Sīra. He says he accessed Ibn Isḥāq’s narration through Muhammad b. Mūsā al-Qurṭubī. It is not clear who this scholar was. He is not mentioned in the list of the sufis Ibn al-ʿArabī studied with in the Rūḥ al-quds.926

Nevertheless, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s extensive travels, and participation in many scholarly, mystical, and political circles, make it tenable that he worked with a Cordovan scholar who transmitted Ibn Isḥāq’s Sīra.927 The Muḥāḍarat and his other works reveal the bits of knowledge and memory circulating in Islamic mystical circles. In Austin’s words, Ibn al-

ʿArabī “gave expression to the teachings and insights of the generations of sufis who preceded him, recording for the first time, systematically and in detail, the vast fund of sufi experience and oral tradition, by drawing on a treasury of technical terms and symbols greatly enriched by centuries of intercourse between the Muslim and Neo-Hellenistic worlds.”928

Ibn al-ʿArabī parsed out the material in the Sīra and reorganized it for his own purposes and did not copy the Sīra in full. Ibn al-ʿArabī organized the initial part of his work according to the following topics: Muhammad’s life, Umayyad caliphs’ reigns,

Abbasid caliphs’ reigns, history of humanity from Adam to Muhammad’s hijra, some

ḥadīth of Muhammad, reports about the first four caliphs. After this section, the chapters become less topical, less historical and more conceptual; they cover didactic narratives, treatises about sufi concepts, poetry, among others. The story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ is placed within this latter part, as a didactic story on sufism and piety in general.

926 The Spirit of Holiness. R. W. J. Austin, trans., Sufis of Andalusia: The Rūḥ al-quds and al- Dhurrat al-fākhirah of Ibn ʿArabī (London: George Allen & Unwind Ltd., 1971), 63-160. 927 For a summary of his travels and scholarship, see ibid., 21-49. 928 Ibid., 48.

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5.5. Concluding remarks: Life and travels of a story

The story of Paul and John (Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ) took us from Edessan Syriac hagiography to early Islamic historiography, universal historiography, qur’ānic exegesis, and sufi literature. In all of these contexts, we have seen the same story with a different context and orientation. The texts within which the story of Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ is placed showed that the narrative was repurposed not through any major rephrasing, but through glossary, commentary, and placement among other textual units. I summarize these contexts in the table below to illustrate the life and travels of this brief yet powerful story in Islamic literature.

Work Author/ Title/form of the Literary role Compiler narrative 8th c. al-Sīra al-nabawiyya Ibn Isḥāq / Reporting from Origin of Ibn Hishām Wahb b. Munabbih Christianity in south Arabia. Their disciple is a Muslim, and his people were persecuted in the trench (Q85:4-8). Exegetical overtones, and participation of Christian saints in the Islamic community. 10th c. Tārīkh al-rusul wal- al-Ṭabarī Reporting from Historical mulūk Ibn Isḥāq information on the origin of Christianity in south Arabia, and participation of Christian saints in the Islamic community.

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12th c. Muʿjam al-buldān Yāqūt Entry on Najrān, Christian holy men al-Ḥamawī reporting from as faḍā’il of south Ibn Isḥāq Arabia, after which the author provides genealogies and history of buildings, and Muhammad’s praising of the region. th 13 c. Muḥāḍarat al-abrār Ibn ʿArabī Story (khabar) of Examples of sufi wa-musāmarat al- Fīmyūn and his acts piety. akhyār of devotion The two ascetics stay (ʿibādātihi) and what as Christians. happened to him th 14 c. al-Bidāya wal-nihāya Ibn Kathīr Reporting from Historical Ibn Isḥāq information on the origin of Christianity in south Arabia (the story is placed among the historical material, not among earlier, biblical material.

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CHAPTER 5: CHRISTIAN HAGIOGRAPHY IN ISLAMIC LITERATURE: A THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

We have seen a broad array of Islamic texts in which Christian hagiographical knowledge is found in the form of tropes, personas, or stories. The stories of the Youths of Ephesus,

Alexander the Great, Antony of Egypt, George Megalomartyros, Marūthā of Maypherqat,

Bishop Paul and Priest John of Edessa, the Martyrs of Najrān, among others, were reoriented in Islamic literature towards various functions. They were used in order to elucidate qur’ānic passages, to praise a region, to give historical information, or to define the Muslim community and Islamic religious practice. All of the examples that I analyzed brought to fore significant questions with regard to mechanisms of transmission. The current chapter revisits some of the themes, issues, and notions that greatly contributes to a nuanced understanding of transmission of hagiographical knowledge between

Christianity and Islam. In light of the examples above, I will discuss the Islamic perception of Christian ascetics, monks and monasticism; authority and authorship in hagiographical transmission; and contexts and routes of transmission.

5.1. Monks, monasticism, and the Islamic notion of sanctity

Nomenclature is often a helpful compass to analyze the nature of hagiographical transmissions. The saintly people whose personas or stories were transmitted from the

Christian tradition are generally referred to as pious men, or with their secular titles, such as the Two-horned king. Antony is referred to as a sā’iḥ - an anchorite, or a traveling holy

289 man;929 St. George as a “righteous servant of God;” St. Marūthā as a governor of the region, ra’īs, like his father. Bishop Paul and Priest John became ascetic men in the Islamic version of their story. Holy men’s religious titles in the Christian tradition, as monk, bishop, priest, etc., are not repeated in the Islamic expressions of their stories. Pre-Islamic holy men, once adapted into the Islamic tradition, were generally not referred to as monks or priests, even though in the Christian versions of their stories they held those titles. Islamic representations of “monks,” on the other hand, were often distinguished from those of

Islamicized Christian saints, and this distinction is important.

There are numerous representations of Christian monks in pre-Islamic and Islamic

Arabic literature. The Qur’ān mostly presents monks in favorable light.930 In Q5:82 it is mentioned that priests and monks are not arrogant, and they are among those Christians who are closest to true believers. Even in verses in which monks are praised in this manner, the Qur’ān admonishes against people taking them as associates of God. There is one verse,

Q9:34, in which monks are portrayed negatively, as consumers of peoples’ wealth. Islamic literature, as Griffith and others highlight, often emphasized monks’ venerability.931 The monk Baḥīra, who, according to the tradition, confirmed Muhammad’s prophethood before he himself knew it, is among the better known.932

929 Hans Wehr, 4th ed., 513, “sāḥ/sūḥ.” 930 The verses mentioning monks are Q5:82, Q9:31, Q9:34, Q16:87. On the representation of monks in the Qur’ān see Griffith, “Monasticism and monks,” EQ. Note that monasticism (rahbāniyya) is presented as a later Christian invention in the Qur’ān, in verse Q57:27, and we will return to this distinction shortly. 931 Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 30-31. For Muslims venerating contemporary Christian holy men, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 364ff. 932 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 79-81; Barbara Roggema, The Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā: Eastern Christin Apologetics and Apocalyptic in Response to Islam (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009).

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In Ibn Isḥāq’s presentation, the monk Baḥīra is one of the people who saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad while the latter was still a child. According to the biographical tradition, before this monk, other Christians who studied the scriptures, Jews, and sorcerers also saw these signs.933 Note that Ibn Isḥāq has a separate section in which he treats all of these groups, namely, soothsayers, Jewish rabbis and Christian monks, together, as the ones who saw the signs of prophethood.934 Surely the account of the monk

Baḥīra is lengthier than the other accounts of the identification of the early signs of

Muhammad’s prophethood. But this only testifies to the fact that by Ibn Isḥāq’s time

(eighth c.) knowledge about monks in Arabia was more extensive than that of sorcerers, possibly due to the close encounters with ascetics and monastic communities in the Ḥijāz and neighboring regions. Hence the details in the narrative, such as Baḥīra’s cell, his books, his hosting of visitors, all of which are well-known aspects of late antique asceticism. After

Baḥīra, other monks also saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad, or heralded his imminent prophecy.935 These accounts in the Sīra affirm that the “monk” was a literary trope, symbolizing asceticism, wisdom, and clairvoyance (as did other tropes, such as a person who extensively studied the scriptures, or a sorcerer). 936 Note that in ḥadīth

933 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 69-79, 82-83. 934 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 90ff. 935 Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 82, 103. 936 The well-known example of a knowledgeable Christian who saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad was Waraqa b. Nawfal, a cousin of Muhammad’s first wife Khadīja, repeatedly referred to in the Sīra. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 69, 98, 107. For other venerable Christians with the knowledge of the scriptures at the emergence of Islam, see ibid., 98-103. Another attribution of clairvoyance to monks is found in the Kitāb al-rāhib [Book of the Monk], attributed to the eighth-century chemist and philosopher Jābir b. Ḥayyān. In this text, a monk teaches Jābir about the philosophers’ stone. Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. Emile and Jenny Marmorstein (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 248-50. Although many texts attributed to Jābir are from the ninth or the tenth century, the text reflects

291 literature as well, this trope is reinforced. In the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī there is a single report in which a monk is mentioned, as a source of knowledge and clairvoyance for someone who wanted to know whether his repentance will be accepted.937

Elizabeth Key Fowden defines the process of adaptation of “good monks before

Muhammad” into the Islamic tradition as “absorption,” as opposed to “rejection,” of holy men.938 I do not find the reject-or-absorb model to be accurately applicable to what was happening in these processes of transmission. I do not reckon that there were “good” and

“bad” monk categories in the early Islamic perception. A clearer distinction appears to have existed between the solitary monk/ascetic and the community of monks, that is, the monastery. The former, as mentioned above, was an important literary trope with mostly positive, often romantic, connotations of piety, asceticism, wisdom, and clairvoyance.939

As Fowden emphasizes, what “caught the Arabs’ imagination, to judge from early evocations of monks in Arabic poetry and prose, as well as the Qur’ān, was not so much the panoply of Christian parishes, dioceses, Councils and Fathers, but a single evocative sight – the ascetic in his cell, with his book and his lamp, already a beloved theme in pre-

Islamic poetry.”940

the perception of monks as holders of esoteric knowledge at least in scholarly circles in these centuries. P. Kraus and M. Plessner, “D̲ j̲ ābir b. Ḥayyān,” in EI2. 937 Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 56, § 676. 938 Elizabeth Key Fowden, “The lamp and the wine flask: Early Muslim interest in Christian monasticism,” in Islamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East, eds. Anna Akasoy, James Montgomery, Peter Pormann (Cambridge, UK: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2007), 8- 10. 939 Fowden, “Lamp and the wine flask,” 4-6. 940 Ibid., 5. Fowden uses monks and monasticism interchangeably in her article as she discusses Islamic approaches towards them. Note the distinction between the hagiographical “holy man” and the “real” monk, an active participant of social and economic life in Christianity, developed in Jacob Ashkenazi, “Holy man versus monk – village and monastery in the late antique Levant:

292

The negative representations of monks in Islamic literature, on the other hand, comment mostly on their monastic communities and on aspects of monastic life.941 For example, in one of the tales in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Wajal, a monastic community is mocked for the monks’ unskeptical veneration of a person who poses as a monk, merely due to his big beard. Fowden discusses the ways in which monks were “rejected” in the Islamic tradition, as consumers of people’s goods, or perverters of Jesus’ teachings.942 Yet, these representations are commentaries on monastic communities, which engage with commerce, build “pretentious” buildings, and ostensibly stray away from the scriptures with their interpretations and invented practices. Islamic perception and representations of monasticism was shaped by the Islamic understanding of and approaches to institutional

Christianity, a significant part of which was monasticism. It is worth noting that, as Philip

Wood demonstrates, in the eastern Mediterranean, before the coming of Islam, as a result of the on-going Roman-Persian wars in the sixth and the seventh centuries, monasteries and local patrons and bishoprics often opposed one another, competing for ecclesiastical patronage and authority.943 Thus, opposition to and negative images of monasticism was a phenomenon already in the pre-Islamic era, and anti-monastic sentiment was not an Islamic novelty.

Between hagiography and archaeology,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57 (2014): 745-65. 941 There were certainly positive representations of monastic communities, too, to which I will shortly return. 942 Fowden,” “Lamp and the wine flask,” 6-7. Based on the qur’ānic passage Q57:27 and its interpretive tradition. 943 Philip Wood, “Christians in Umayyad Iraq: Decentralization and expansion (600-750),” in Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam, eds. Alain George and Andrew Marsham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 255-74, esp. 266.

293

Solitary monks and ascetics had different perception histories than monastic communities in Islam. In the Qur’ān, particularly in Q57:27, monasticism (rahbāniyya) is presented as a Christian invention; whereas, as we have seen before, monks are portrayed in positive light. The oft-cited ḥadīth according to which Muhammad asserts that there is no rahbāniyya (monasticism, or monkery) in Islam; the monasticism of the Muslim community is jihād (Holy War, or more generally struggling for pietistic purposes) – or according to some variants ḥajj (pilgrimage) – likely opposes monasticism more than it refutes solitary monks (pl. ruhbān) or ascetics.944 As Goldziher emphasizes, based on the qur’ānic discourse, it is unlikely that Muhammad himself uttered any of the statements in which he starkly opposes asceticism.945 Sidney Griffith also emphasizes this, by saying that

“Muslim scholars have also been careful to point out that the disapproval of monasticism should not be mistaken for a disapproval of the hermit’s way of life, or the practice of a religious retreat, including sexual abstinence undertaken for a time for legitimate religious reasons. Rather, what is rejected in monasticism, according to many scholars, is the commitment to lifelong celibacy that the Christian institution entails.” 946 Even if

Muhammad uttered the above statement against monasticism, this comment is not a refutation of the venerability of Christian ascetics and monks, but a conceptualization of the term jihād (or ḥajj) through a discourse of monasticism.

944 Discussed in Alfred Guillaume, The Traditions of Islam (Beirut: Khayats, 1966), 142-43; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:357-60; idem., Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. A. Hamori and R. Hamori (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 123; C. E. Bosworth, “An early Persian Ṣūfī, Shaykh Abū Saʿīd of Mayhanah,” in Logos Islamikos: Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis, eds. R. M. Savory and D. A. Agius (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 79. The latter part of the saying might be a later addition, as discussed in Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 128. 945 Ibid., 123-4. 946 Sidney Griffith, “Monasticism and monks,” in EQ.

294

Despite the positive, affirmative depictions, Islamic literature rarely presented

Christian monks as members of the Muslim community.947 The monk trope was generally used as a tool for legitimization, Islamic identity formation, or for exhortation.948 Stories of monks qua monks mostly originated in the Islamic milieu, never following a pre-Islamic hagiographical narrative attributed to that monk, as observed in the case of Baḥīra.949

Stories of real monks and ascetics from the Christian tradition, however, went through drastic changes in the process of making the heroes of these stories Muslims or Muslim- like. Fowden analyzes the story of Fīmyūn in the biography of Muhammad as an example of a “good monk” which the Islamic tradition “absorbed.”950 But this holy man is never referred to as a monk in the narration of Ibn Isḥāq; he is a believing, ascetic man, a true follower of Jesus, as we have seen. Therefore, Fīmyūn’s portrayal in the Sīra is not an example of the absorption of a “good monk,” but transformation of a Christian monk (in fact, a bishop) to a believer, a member of the Muslim community.

The distinction between holy men of Islam and Christian monks appears to have been established by the time the notion of awliyā (friends of God) developed as a hagiological category.951 Wilāya, which literally means authority or guardianship, refers to

947 For the development of the theory of sanctity in Islam, see Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 185; Donner, Islamic Origins, 92; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 85, 117; Renard, Friends of God, 260ff. 948 Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 11-12, 27ff; Mourad, “Christian monks in Islamic literature: A preliminary report on some Arabic Apophthegmata Patrum,” Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies 6, no. 2 (2004): 2-18. For representations of Christians in various genres of Islamic literature, see the chapters in David Thomas and Alex Mallett, eds., Christian- Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), esp. vol. I. 949 Roggema, Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā, 3-5. 950 Fowden, “Lamp and the wine flask,” 8-10. 951 B. Radtke, et.al., “Walī,” in EI2.

295 the state of being a next of kin, ally, patron, friend of God in Islamic spirituality. As this and other Islamic categories of sanctity developed, extreme asceticism and renunciation of the world (practices associated with Christian asceticism), through various statements attributed to Muhammad, were positioned against Islamic forms of piety.952 The discourse of asceticism became a polemical tool, and the monk became more of an outsider to the

Islamic community. In the Tadhkīrat al-awliyā of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221), for instance, monks either convert to Islam, or they are falsely entitled as monks (in fact being

Muslims).953 They are not members of the community of the friends of God.

In order to nuance our understanding of transmission of hagiographical stories into

Islam, I wanted to emphasize the distinction between the Islamic perception of solitary monks and institutional monastic communities, but the latter were not refuted once and for all. Despite the theological refutations and occasional mockery of Christian monastic institutions, there were numerous depictions of monasteries in positive light, as peaceful oases, sources of knowledge, as hubs of worship and piety, especially in poetry and travel literature.954 Textual evidence further indicates that while on the one hand the monastery became a romanticized literary trope,955 monastery-like communities emerged in Islam, the descriptions of which incorporated significant extents of monastic discourse. The aforementioned report on those who engage with jihād is an example of the use of monastic

952 Goldziher, Introduction Islamic Theology and Law, 116-129. 953 A. J. Arberry, Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliyaʾ (Memorial of the Saints) by Farid al-Din Attar (Iowa: Omphaloskepsis, 2000), 372, 374. For monks as converts to the early community, also see Bertaina, Christian and Muslim Dialogues, 94-99. 954 Fowden, “Lamp and the wine flask,” 12-18. For example, the aforementioned ʿAlī b. Muḥammad Shābushtī’s Kitāb al-diyārāt. 955 Fowden, “Lamp and the wine flask,” 15-18.

296 discourse for the elaboration of an Islamic concept. Another well-studied parallelism is the monastic models and discourse adapted for the definition of the notion of zuhd (asceticism) and sufism in Islam, which will not be revisited here.956

The other context I will point out here is the court. It has been long discussed in scholarship that in early Islam the state was the equivalent of the Church, while the caliph at least theoretically functioned as king and religious authority.957 The social connections between caliphs and ascetics as their proteges, counselors, and critics are frequently emphasized in literature. 958 In some occasions, the intercessory power of the ascetic, through prayers, was even passed on to caliphs, leading to the latter’s sanctification.959

Another manifestation of the intricate relationship between caliphal authority and

956 For the fundamental works and discussions on asceticism and mysticism in Islam and its similarities to Christianity, see Geneviève Gobillot, “Zuhd,” in EI2; L. Massignon et al., “Taṣawwuf,”in EI2; Christopher Melchert, “Asceticism,” in EI3; Tor Andrae, “Zuhd und Mönchtum,” Le Monde Oriental 25 (1931): 296-327; Reynolds Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (New York: Schocken Books, 1975); Ofer Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim ascetics in the world of Christian monasticism,” JSAI 20 (1996): 105-129; Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 134-66; William Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000); Margaret Smith, Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rābiʿa and Other Women Mystics in Islām (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001); James Cutsinger, ed., Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2002); Emma Loosley, “Brothers and brotherhoods: Reflections on Christian and Islamic views of monasticism,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 7, no. 3 (2007): 228-39; Martin Tamcke, ed., Gotteserlebnis und Gotteslehre: christliche und islamische Mystik im Orient (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010); William Chittick, In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought, eds. Kazuyo Murata, Atif Khalil, Mohammed Rustom (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011). 957 Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), passim. For a recent revisitation of the concept of the caliph, see Andrew Marsham, “’God’s caliph’ revisited: Umayyad political thought in its late antique context,” in Power, Patronage, and Memory, eds. George and Marsham, 3-38, esp. 26-27. Note that in the Christian tradition, too, there was what Peter Brown calls a “transfer of sanctity” from Jerusalem to the royal city, the center of political power, in the early Middle Ages. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 141. 958 Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim ascetics,” 126-8. 959 Ibid., 128.

297 ascetics/asceticism was the depiction of caliphs in elevated pietistic forms, and these depictions often included terms of asceticism familiar from the Christian ascetic and monastic tradition. The Umayyad caliph ʿUmar (II) b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 720), for example,

“walked like a monk,” “separated himself from his wives,” owned only one shirt, visited monasteries, among other attributes highlighting his piety and asceticism. 960 The relationship between the Islamic court culture and Christian monastic discourse, however, was not restricted to a shared discourse.

The above analysis of the Wajal by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā adds another dimension to the picture. The Wajal as a didactic text exhorting on piety, and similar texts of adībs serving at the court, 961 indicate that the Abbasid court adapted pedagogical models comparable to the Christian monastery. Albert Dietrich, in his very useful treatment of the topic of the education of Abbasid princes, points to the potential similarities and connections between the Sasanian and the Abbasid court.962 But his analysis is quiet in terms of similar potential connections between the Abbasid court and monasteries of the

Near East, powerful cultural institutions physically more proximate than the Sasanian

960 P. Cobb, “ʿUmar (II) b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz,” in EI2; Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim ascetics,” 108, 110, 111; Antoine Borrut, “The future of the past: Historical writing in early Islamic Syria and Umayyad memory,” in Power, Patronage, and Memory, eds. George and Marsham, 287-88; Khalek, “Early Islamic history reimagined: The biography of ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz in Ibn ʿAsākir’s Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 134, no. 3 (2014): 431-51, esp. 435, 438-9, 450. For an overview of the employment of Byzantine hagiographical tropes in Islamic literature, see Khalek, “Byzantine hagiographical topoi.” 961 The Abbasid-era adab works on virtues and vices, piety, righteous behavior is voluminous. A few of the better known examples are al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d. 868) Fī faṣl mā bayn al-ʿadāwa wal-ḥasad [On the Difference between Enmity and Envy], Kitāb kitmān al-sirr wa ḥifẓ al-lisān [On Keeping Secrets and Guarding One’s Tongue], Kitāb al-bukhalā [the Book of Misers], among others. Pellat, “Al-Jāḥiẓ,” 78-95. 962 Albert Dietrich, “Some aspects of the education of princes at the ʿAbbāsid court,” in Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World, ed. Claude Gilliot (Surrey; Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 27-37, esp. 31-36.

298 court. As Jack Tannous extensively demonstrates, Christian monasteries were prominent institutions where extensive cultural production took place in the Near East starting from the seventh century.963 A wide array of subjects, Tannous demonstrates, from scripture to poetry, hagiography to history, were studied at the monasteries. My analysis shows that the spiritual and moral tutoring of Abbasid princes was in some ways similar to the monastic pedagogical models, using Islamic versions of what would be identified as monastic literature in Christianity. This comparison highlights that in the Middle Ages there were certain overarching institutional models across Christian and Muslim communities; and one of these models, the pedagogical content, was seen in the two major institutions, namely, the court (Abbasid, Sasanian, Byzantine) and the Christian monastery.

Family-based religiosity of the elite, in late antique and early medieval Christianity, is known to have yielded household monasteries, as seen in various Roman families.964

We observe such model of family-based piety expressed in monastic discourse in the

Abbasids, albeit operating in an Islamic frame. It is worth noting that poetry about asceticism had already become popular at the court by the court poet Abu’l-ʿAtāhiya’s time

(d. 825).965 Literature about asceticism, models of piety, and spiritual and moral formation also found significant consumption at the court, through the Abbasid family and the other

963 Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 167-198. 964 Maskarinec, City of Saints, 100-16. On household asceticism and urban semi-monastic communities, one remembers the renowned example of Macrina, sister of the fourth-century Cappadocian Fathers Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. Burrus, “Macrina’s pious household,” 167-81; Vasileiou, “Privacy and asceticism in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of St. Macrina,” 451-63. Also consider Jerome’s patrons, Marcella and her mother Albina, and Melania the Younger, a prominent member of the Roman aristocracy in the fifth century, who moved to the Holy Land and put her estates to the service of the Church. The most recent scholarship on her is Catherine Chin and Caroline Schroeder, eds., Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). 965 Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 121-2.

299 scholarly households connected to the court culture. 966 Of course, the Abbasid court, especially after the refashioning of the court culture after al-Ma’mūn, patronized the production and translation of many forms of culture, including writings on literature, poetry, science, and theology;967 works on asceticism and spiritual formation constituted only a part of it. Moreover, family-based religiosity in Islam, and its manifestations in pan-

Mediterranean religious terms, was by no means restricted to the Abbasids. Syrian, south

Arabian, Iraqi, and, of course, Meccan-Medinan families adopted late antique hagiographical discourses to describe their piety, asceticism, and (sometimes esoteric) religious knowledge, to which we will shortly return. The Abbasid court example is important not in its uniqueness, but in that it brings to fore the pedagogical aspect of such family piety. The abundance, consumption, and appreciation of pedagogical writings like the Wajal marks a time period in which the Muslim court became an important comparandum to the Christian monastery. And this adds an important layer of meaning in our discussion of Muslims’ perception of and relations with Christian monks and monasticism.

5.2. Authorship and transmission of hagiographical knowledge

A significant consideration in the analyses of transmission of saints’ stories is the concept of authorship. Hagiography of a saint is often an incremental dossier in the Christian tradition, and the Islamic version of the saint’s story is an organic complement to that dossier. Islamic versions of saints’ personas and hagiographical narratives certainly spoke

966 Ibid., 246. 967 Ibid., 243-60.

300 to different audiences, operating in different cultural and semiotic systems, but so did many narratives among various Christian communities. Therefore, the extents of saints’ dossiers should be assessed not by linguistic and confessional boundaries, but by the continuation of remembrances of that saint. The examples analyzed heretofore point at the active authorship of Muslim scholars, who consulted texts, received help from translators, built stories upon the broad hagiographical knowledge available about their subjects, and incorporated oral tradition in their narratives. These strategies were among the significant components of processes of authority-building and authorship in antiquity, as numerous case studies in other fields also highlight.968 Medieval Islamic literature’s conversations with Christian hagiography add important layers to this discussion.

Authorship in Islamic literature, especially the literary agencies of authors and compilers in historiography, is extensively studied.969 Yet, due to the vast corpus of literary

968 Some of the recent important scholarship on the concept of authorship in the Greco-Roman and European traditions are: Pamela Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Reniassance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas, eds., European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Anna Marmodoro and Jonathan Hill, eds., The Author’s Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Reinhart Ceulemans and Peiter de Liemans, eds., On Good Authority: Tradition, Compilation and the Construction of Authority in Literature from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney, eds., Rethinking “Authority” in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2018). 969 Some of the fundamental works are: Tarif Khalidi, Islamic Historiography: The Histories of Masʿūdī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975); idem., Arabic Historical Thought; Stefan Leder, “Authorship and transmission in unauthored literature: The akhbār attributed to Haytham ibn ʿAdī ,” Oriens 31 (1988): 67-81; Stephan Leder and Hilary Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic prose literature: A researchers’ sketch map,” Journal of Arabic Literature 23 (1992): 2-26; Tayeb Al-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography. Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Narrative of the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate (Cambridge; New York, 1996); Leder, ed., Story-telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature; Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins; Robinson, Islamic Historiography; Konrad Hirschler, Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (London; New York: Routledge, 2006); Hoyland, “History, fiction and authorship,” 16-46; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, passim.

301 material, developing an intricate understanding of medieval authors’ uses of their sources, their self-representations, and citationalities and intertextualities among various traditions remains to be a desideratum in scholarship. In addition to the dazzling volume of literature that put limitations on scholarship, such analyses are also often shaped by modern assumptions of medieval historiography. To illustrate, because Islamic literature in its early phase prominently adopted report-based transmission system, scholars tend to operate on a binary, assuming for Islamic historiography that either the majority of the reports faithfully preserve original accounts, or reports were freely refashioned as literary artifacts rather than historical facts, depending on the social contexts and the personal agendas of authors.970 My analysis of hagiographical transmission, because it involves texts from various genres, shifts focus from genre-specific to content-specific dynamics of authorship, asking what strategies of authorship were practiced when Christian saints’ stories were transmitted into Islam.

Scholars suggested various models for modes of transmission and its relation to authorship. For example, Leder and Kilpatrick develop a frame for authorship in early

Islamic prose literature based on the presence of the author.971 They argue that prose works were either compilations or compositions, and the latter could be fictional and non- fictional, albeit acknowledging that such categorization was not always straightforward.972

All of the texts I analyzed above consist of compilations of reports, with different degrees

970 For a review of the multiple tendencies in scholarship to approach Islamic historiography, see Hirschler, Authors as Actors, 2-3; Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 1-31, 255-71. 971 Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic prose literature,” 2-26. 972 Ibid., 16.

302 of the visibility of “the writer’s guiding hand,”973 which does not translate to the originality of the text. The example that is potentially closest to an “original work” is Ibn Abī al-

Dunyā’s Wajal, and even that text, as the analysis demonstrated, had conversations with multiple literary traditions. In compilations, on the other hand, contrary to what Leder and

Kilpatrick argue, the author does not always “entirely conceal himself.”974 In the Tījān, for example, Ibn Hishām alternates between his quotation of Wahb b. Munabbih and his own narration. Thus, I do not find the compilation-composition dichotomy to be helpful in discussions of authorship.

Victor Rosen’s categorization of authorship based on al-Ṭabarī’s historiographical sources is helpful in nuancing between translation (naql), translation-compilation (naql wa-jamʿ), and redaction (iṣlāḥ).975 In many cases, however, it is impossible to determine which authors practiced a specific mode of transmission, especially in the absence of the authors’ description of their own writing and compilation. Applying this model to the examples above, one sees the utility of the model and its shortcomings. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā asserts that he is directly transmitting a story of St. Antony from another text. He is practicing naql in this case (direct translation/transmission with minimal modification), but we have no information with regard to the authority of this preceding text. As we have seen in the analysis, he might have in fact penned the Wajal based on his broad knowledge of the hagiographical dossier of St. Antony and fables from other traditions, juxtaposing and altering them to create a new narrative, and thus might have practiced iṣlāḥ. Ibn al-Azraq

973 The term is used in ibidem. 974 Ibid., 16-17. 975 This model is summarized and used by Mohsen Zakeri, who analyzes historians’ use of Ibn al- Muqaffaʿ’s Khudāynāmah in their historiographical works. Zakeri, “Al-Ṭabarī on Sasanian history,” 28-29 fn. 4.

303 also explicitly practices naql, when he incorporates a translation of the Life of Marūthā in his historiography. The original text is very much present with a high level of authority in the Muslim author’s text. Ibn Hishām’s portrayal of the Two-horned king exemplifies the application of naql wa- jamʿ, since he both directly quotes Wahb b. Munabbih, and includes his own information on the history of the kings of south Arabia in the Tījān. In the case of al-Ṭabarī and his representation of St. George we might be witnessing naql wa- jamʿ or iṣlāḥ. It is difficult to tell how strictly he follows Wahb b. Munabbih’s account. But we can say that either Wahb or al-Ṭabarī substantially changed the discourse of the Christian story of St. George and reoriented the narrative towards an Islamic semiotic system.

My analysis brings to fore an alternative model: the five functions of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature as indicators of five modes of authorship. These functions are exegetical, didactic, encomiastic, historical/etiological, or communal reorientation of a narrative. And they roughly translate into certain extents of character development in

Islamic (versus Christian) hagiological terms, connection to the qur’ānic time frame, integration of Islamic-qur’ānic discourse, and integration of external oral or textual material. A similar model was indicated by Robert Hoyland, who argues for a distinction between the authorship practices of historians, ḥadīth scholars, and adībs based on authors’ attention to chains of transmission and their alterations of the reports. 976 Hoyland emphasizes that although these groups of authors rely on the same material, their approaches to authenticity of the material yielded different modes of authorship. Hoyland’s theorization is similar to mine in emphasizing the role of the narrative and its context in

976 Hoyland, “History, fiction and authorship,” 19-22. Also see Khalidi’s discussion on authors approaching their material from the confines of specific disciplines. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 24, 34-39, et passim.

304 the formation of authorship, yet, it still uses genre to determine the context of the narrative.

Authorship in tārīkh works is different than in ḥadīth and in adab, according to this conceptualization. As Hoyland mentions, the conventions of these literatures were crystallized at a time before which authorial practices were less well-defined.977 He further develops this theory of authorship by pointing to the narratological devices and their utilization towards authors’ goals (emplotment and causality) that determine modes of authorship.978 Through the case studies above, I build on this model and argue that the five semiotic roles of narrative in a certain text determine the dynamics of authorship.

This model is based on the (re)uses of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, and it may not apply to other material that is embedded in Islamic literature. For example, one might develop a different frame for authorship practices based on various modes of scriptural quotations and allusions in Islamic literature. Furthermore, although the model is based on functions of hagiography, it does not have a functionalist claim. In other words, with this model, I do not argue that every time a Christian hagiography is used in Islamic literature for a particular purpose, it results in similar outcomes in terms of the transformation of the narrative and the literary strategies of the author. Despite such restrictions, the model prompts us to think about authorship in narratological terms, since it points at different literary practices based on different orientations of narratives, and authorship as a collective activity, and shifts focus from individual authors to stories and their incremental trajectories. Of course, one cannot exclusively focus on the narrative at the expense of the author. The analyses in the previous chapters, adopting a new historicist

977 Hoyland, “History, fiction and authorship,” 28. 978 Ibid., 26-32.

305 approach, demonstrated how the social context of authors and compilers might have contributed to the ways in which stories were reoriented.

Transfer, or distribution, of authorship in literature obscures the layers of authorship included in the narration of stories.979 In all of the examples, we read reports on the authority of transmitters who lived generations before the authors/compilers of the texts that are analyzed. Through the example of the most prominent of them, namely, the Yemeni historian Wahb b. Munabbih, we will raise further questions regarding authorship. Wahb is cited as the source of Ibn Hishām’s story of south Arabian Dhū al-Qarnayn, al-Ṭabarī’s exegesis of the qur’ānic Dhū al-Qarnayn, al-Ṭabarī’s story of St. George, Ibn Isḥāq’s story of the conversion of Najrān to Christianity, and the story of Paul and John, among numerous other stories of prophets and saints in Islamic literature. He is also cited for brief anecdotes and aphorisms, like in a report at the beginning of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Wajal, in which he says “Luqman said to his son, ‘Son, hope for God in a manner which will not embolden you to disobey Him, and fear God in a manner which will not make you despair of his mercy.’”980 Wahb became an authority on biblical knowledge in Islamic literature, an extensively cited source. Thus, understanding his authorship and authority greatly enhances the discussion.

Wahb was an active collector of stories. His itinerancy, an emphasized aspect of his biographical tradition, points at the court, scholarly circles, pilgrimage and other travel routes, monastic communities, and even prison, as contexts of his scholarly endeavors and

979 For the phenomenon of transfer of authorship, see Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History, 7-9, 80-91; also see Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 40ff; Leder, “Authorship and transmission,” 67-81. 980 Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 44.

306 exchanges. The dazzling number of books that he read is an essential aspect of his hagiographical representation.981 He also collected folklore in the towns he visited. There are many books attributed to him, which testifies to his vast knowledge remembered in the

Islamic community. We are not sure, however, whether he de facto penned any books, or mostly orally transmitted his knowledge. He most probably did both, since his oral narrations are remembered as vividly as his “books.” Therefore, one cannot reconstruct much of his authorship, except for pointing that he was a prolific collector and transmitter.

Nevertheless, his example raises two important notions: Assigned authorship, and the authorship of the family.

The former is a term I suggest using for the disposition in a literary tradition to attribute a certain type of content to a particular (real or imagined) author in order to contain, ascribe, and control that material. We could think of this as typecasting the author.

As Suleiman Mourad and others argue, misattributing traditions to Muhammad,

Companions and other authorities was a very common practice in Islamic literature.982 In

Wahb’s case, we see that a dazzling number of traditions about the biblical past was attributed to him, as a result of which Wahb’s name became a container for biblical stories in Islam. Much material, one might imagine, was assigned to his authorship after they were transmitted to Islam through other reporters, storytellers, and transmitters. This practice gave authority to the transmitted material, by attributing it to a source already known for his vast biblical knowledge. Such assignment also enabled the control of the material, for the majority of the material attributed to Wahb was placed in literary genres that had

981 Duri, “Beginnings of historical folklore,” 124. 982 Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History, 7-9, 80-91; also see Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 40ff; Leder, “Authorship and transmission,” 67-81.

307 relatively less theological connotation than those like tafsīr or ḥadīth. Thus, we can also term this sort of authorship as an isolated or confined authorship.

As for the authorship of the family, again Wahb’s example throws great light upon it. The majority of the material attributed to Wahb was transmitted by his family members, who were active listeners, recorders, and transmitters of Wahb’s knowledge of Jewish and

Christian traditions. For example, we know of a history book, titled “the Beginning,” on the authority of Wahb’s great-grandson, a descendant of his daughter. 983 As the title indicates, this book probably includes the story of the Creation and of biblical prophets, the types of stories Wahb is renowned for. Wahb’s family also narrated stories about his immense knowledge. Wahb’s brother Maʿqil’s son ʿAbduṣṣamad reports: “I heard somebody in Mecca asking my uncle Wahb to tell him about [the prophet] David, and he agreed [to narrate about him]”. 984 Munabbih’s family played an active role in both preserving the material Wahb transmitted, and solidifying his memory as a pious, ascetic, and knowledgeable man.

Nancy Khalek discusses the importance of “family notes” in establishing family piety and preserving the family memory in early Islam through the example of the

Ghassanid family in Syria, and their collection of anecdotes that are partly preserved in the tenth-century Kitāb akhbār wa-ḥikayāt, to which we will briefly return.985 Wahb’s family similarly preserved and transmitted the information he acquired, presenting a great example of family-based scholarship. In the context of the household, where scholarship is

983 Dodge, Fihrist, 1:203. The author Ibn al-Nadīm mentions is “ʿAbd al-Munʿim b. Idrīs b. Sinān b. ibnat Wahb b. Munabbih.” 984 Khoury, Wahb, 1:259. 985 Khalek, Damascus, 11-12, 42-43, 52, 150ff.

308 framed by the family, and literary production partly functions as a cultural asset for the image and identity of the family, the notion of authorship appears as a collective practice.

Another question I will raise here, which complicates the notion of transfer of authorship, is the problem of invisible authors. We have access to the writings of scholars with skilled literacy (a product of grammatical and rhetorical training), who relied heavily on the compositions of semi-literate transmitters, such as storytellers. The latter’s involvement in the process of composition and transmission into Islam is often neglected in modern scholarship.986 They are not considered as authors based on rather restricted or conventional definitions of authorship. Chase Robinson, for example, states that

Muhammad’s life was written before there were authors in the Islamic community.987

However, literary sources reveal (and sometimes explicitly describe) that oral narrators of stories were important authorities in composition of saints’ stories in antiquity, as my discussion of hagiodiegesis in the Introduction and Chapter 1 demonstrated. Moreover,

Islamic versions of stories, in the hands of storytellers, travelers, pilgrims, and merchants, were often reintegrated into the dossiers of Christian saints. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony, for example, possibly having circulated in the Abbasid court before Muslim and Christian audiences, contributed to the image and perception of the eminent Egyptian desert father in the Middle Ages for both Muslims and Christians. Hagiodiegesis, the pietistic practice of storytelling, enabled ways in which narrators established authority through non-written media such as performative narrations, preaching, debates, and remembrance, both in

986 Storytellers’ contribution to authorship is briefly discussed in Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic prose literature,” 14-15; also see Leder, “Authorship and transmission,” 67-81. 987 Robinson, “History and heilsgeschichte,” 133.

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Christianity and Islam. Therefore, the authority and authorship of oral narrators is a fleeting yet significant component of the notion of authorship in antiquity.

5.3. Contexts and routes of transmission

The analysis of Christian hagiography and hagiodiegesis in the Introduction highlighted many contexts in which saints’ stories were narrated and listened to in late antique

Christianity, among which are local and Holy Land pilgrimage, saints’ shrines, liturgy, imperial court, hospitals, prison, household, and theatre. The integration of Islamic literature into this analysis greatly enhances our understanding of ancient storytelling and oral circulation of hagiography. The abovementioned contexts are also emphasized in

Islamic literature as points of contact between persons and communities to exchange stories. We will closely look into two of them here, namely, the household and scholarly travels as two major components and contexts of narrative transmission.

In late antiquity, family-based piety and asceticism was a prominent context in which saints’ stories were generated, preserved, and circulated. In Reading Renunciation,

Elizabeth Clark, following Susanna Elm and Philip Rousseau, discusses household asceticism as a prominent form of asceticism, through the example of Macrina, the sister of the Cappadocian Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great. 988 The scholarly discussion on the multiple aspects of family-based piety and asceticism is continued, among other works, by Kim Bowes, and by Clark’s students in the recent volume on

988 Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 34-35. For anti-familiality in ascetic discourse, see ibid.,177ff; Elm, Virgins of God, 34-49.

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Melania the Elder (d. 410).989 One aspect of family piety in late antique Christianity, scholars demonstrate, was scholarship. Production and transmission of scriptural and hagiographical knowledge was a “higher form of asceticism,” and a tool to build, define, and demonstrate family piety.990 The case of the Cappadocian fathers, with their extensive hagiographical endeavors devoted to their family members hardly needs to be re- emphasized. Around the same time, according to her biographical tradition, Melania the

Elder, by narrating stories of prophets and saints, biblical and extra-biblical, both instructed her family members, and established the intellectual-pietistic prestige of the family.991

Maya Maskarinec’s recent book992 demonstrates the continuation of this practice.

She argues that in the sixth century, saint veneration and hagiographical production became venues through which elite families in Rome competed with one another.993 For example, the Life of Sabina was authored and expanded under the patronage of the Caecinae family, as the wealthy patron Sabina slowly transformed into an ascetic and saint. The family also brought the relics and stories of “foreign” saints from the eastern provinces of the Empire to Rome, building shrines for them on their family estates. Stories, alongside with relics, were highly valuable commodities, the transmission of which was among the axiomatic practices related to household piety. In other words, cultivation of a pietistic image for the

989 Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Melania, eds. Chin and Schroeder. 990 Clark, Reading Renunciation, 56-57. 991 For Melania and her scripturual and hagiographical teachings, see Introduction, 16-17. For families and the continual lines of priesthood in the Syriac Church in late antiquity, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 204-5. 992 Maskarinec, City of Saints, esp. cpt. 5. 993 For renunciation and monastic patronage, see Clark, Reading Renunciation, 37-38. For the patronage of authorship of texts, ibid., 50.

311 family necessitated a display of knowledge of saints. How did this change with the coming of Islam?

We know of Christian families who had deep rooted traditions of family scholarship, which continued their practices into the early Islamic era. The Edessan family of the Gūmāyē, as Muriel Debié demonstrates, was a noble family that served the Umayyad court in the early eighth century, while continuing their historiographical endeavors within the family. 994 A “dynasty of historians” within the family preserved and transmitted traditions related to their family, as well as other noble Syrian Orthodox families.995

Similarly, Sidney Griffith shows the intricate relationship between the Manṣūr family in

Damascus and the Umayyads.996 Members of this family, renowned for their scholarly qualifications, served both the Roman and the Umayyad court as bureaucrats, the most well-known member of the family being the notorious theologian John of Damascus (d.

749).997 The examples clearly demonstrate the continuation of family-based scholarship in

Christian families under Islam. What about the families that converted to Islam?

With many families’ gradual conversion to Islam starting from the seventh century, some forms of pietistic competition ceased. For example, the building projects of tribal churches and monasteries, a wide-spread practice in late antique eastern Mediterranean as

994 Muriel Debié, “Christians in the service of the caliph: Through the looking glass of communal identities,” in Christians and Others in the Umayyad State, eds. Antoine Borrut and Fred Donner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 53-71. 995 Ibid., 55. 996 Sidney Griffith, “The Manṣūr family and Saint John of Damascus: Christians and Muslims in Umayyad Times,” in Christians and Others, eds. Borrut and Donner, 29-51. 997 The bibliography on John of Damascus is vast. The essential works can be found in ibid., 45- 51.

312 well as other places,998 was no longer a prominent venue for displaying piety for the recently-converted families. Yet, other forms, such as family scholarship, especially transmission of knowledge on the biblical past and hagiographical stories as a manifestation of family piety and prestige, continued into the new religious system. Julia

Bray’s brief overview of the modern scholarship on medieval Muslim family demonstrates that beyond the scholarly elites (ʿulamā) and ruling dynasties, the social, cultural, religious, and economic aspects of the medieval Muslim household remains to be underexplored.999

My analyses bring to fore a significant aspect of the sociology of the Muslim family.

Knowledge about pre-Islamic prophets and saints was a significant cultural currency in the early Islamic milieu, as it was for Christians in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and this currency was often in the protection and economy of the family. This currency was collected, organized, and utilized towards building authority and prestige by many families, both high aristocratic, and those with limited access to the topmost levels of scholarly and political authority.

As Nancy Khalek states, scholarship in the early Islamic milieu was “a family affair, where one family could produce several scholars who preserved traditions in a generational pattern.”1000 This was witnessed by Ibn al-Nadīm, who, in his account of the history of Islamic scholarship, sometimes refers to families as collective producers of scholarship, instead of individual authors.1001 One important aspect of family scholarship

998 On pre-Islamic tribal church and monastic establishments, see Fowden, “Lamp and the wine flask,” 4-5. On the continuation of church building under the Umayyad rule, see Debié, “Christians in the service of the caliph,” 57-60. 999 Julia Bray, “The family in the medieval Islamic world,” History Compass 9 (2011): 731-42. 1000 Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 42-43. 1001 Dodge, Fihrist, 1:283, 316, 322, 543, 554.

313 was that Muslim families, through their collections of scriptural and hagiographical anecdotes and “books,” established their own sanctity and intellectual prestige. 1002 In such identity building processes, the knowledge of Christian scripture and hagiography was an important currency. I will use Liz Clark’s words here, since her observation of Christians using their knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures for elaborating on Christian ascetic practices is directly applicable to early Muslim families’ use of their knowledge on

Christianity to define the Islamic notion of sanctity: “[Muslims] from early times not only had retained the [Christian] Scriptures as part of their sacred literature, but also had claimed them as their own exclusive possession, they, too, were faced with making meaning of passages that had for them no direct ritual applicability. By imparting new meaning to these texts, [Muslims], like [Christians], could speak inspiringly to later generations of devotees.”1003

Khalek shows this through her extensive analysis of the aforementioned Kitāb akhbār wa-ḥikāyāt by Muḥammad b. al-Fayḍ al-Ghassānī (mid-tenth c.). It is a collection of 106 proverbs, anecdotes, scriptural quotations, and poetry on piety, asceticism, and exemplary behavior. Some reports do not have an exhortative value; they are snippets of historical information, such as important people’s death dates. Muḥammad transmits these reports on the authority of his family members. It is worth noting that all of the reports about biblical prophets are transmitted within the family (on the authority of Ibrāhīm, his

1002 Kennedy, Court of Caliphs, 254-7, 260. 1003 Clark, Reading Renunciation, 208. This passage is originally about Christians and Jews. I took the liberty to replace “Christians” and “Jews” with “Muslims” and “Christians,” respectively, in the places marked by brackets.

314 father Hishām, and his grandfather Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Ghassānī (mid-eighth c.)); 1004 whereas, the reports on generic concepts or early Islamic personas and events are reported from other authorities outside the family. Thus, the family knowledge of the biblical past was emphasized through such chains of transmission that consisted of the family members’ names.

The household of the south Arabian Munabbih and his sons is yet another example of family as a space of inter-generational transmission. As mentioned before, the works of brothers Wahb, Maʿqil and Hammām b. Munabbih were preserved by their family members and descendants, who played crucial role in establishing their scholarly prestige as authorities in scriptural knowledge, biblical historiography, folklore, as well as traditions of Muhammad.1005 In early Islam, in Paul Cobb’s words, “a scholar’s older relatives were natural sources of information about previous generations, so that father-son pairs, and even more extended families, often shared in the transmission of traditions.”1006 In the works of the members of Munabbih’s family, as well as the Ghassanid family, we see this practice. To recall Pierre Bourdieu and Catherine Bell’s theorization of ritual, these families attempted at creating difference among other elite families through the ritualistic practice of knowledge transmission.1007

1004 Muḥammad b. al-Fayḍ al-Ghassānī, Kitāb akhbār wa-ḥikāyāt, ed. Ibrāhīm Ṣāliḥ (Damascus, Dār al-shām lil-ṭabaʿa, 1994) §6, §7, §8, §12, §13, §18. For a partial reconstruction of the family tree, see Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 46. 1005 Khoury, Wahb, 1:189, 222ff; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 7. 1006 Paul Cobb, “Scholars and society at early Islamic Ayla,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 4 (1995): 421. 1007 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 119.

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We see one of the top-most examples of such identity building in the shīʿī tradition, where ḥadīths about Muhammad were transmitted by his descendants and relatives.1008 The privileged position of Muhammad’s family in economic, political, and religious matters began during the lifetime of Muhammad,1009 and it is beyond our scope here to give an account of the development of the shīʿī movement.1010 Suffice it to say that roughly in the mid-eighth century (the same time when the abovementioned families were active in scholarship) shīʿī doctrine and law began to take shape. Numerous traditions of

Muhammad were collected and transmitted by the relatives and descendants of Muhammad in this time period. The imāms, the spiritual leaders of the community, were portrayed as receiving esoteric, divine knowledge.1011 The imāms (all descendants of Muhammad) were on the one hand protectors and embodiments of Muhammad’s traditions, and on the other hand, their sayings and practices themselves were among the sources of religious law, alongside with those of Muhammad, for the shīʿa.1012 The shīʿī tradition, thus, is the most prominent example of developing family piety and prestige through knowledge, scholarship, and transmission of tradition.

1008 W. Madelung, “S̲ h̲ īʿa,” in EI2. 1009 Ibid.; I. Goldziher, C. van Arendonk, and A. S. Tritton, “Ahl al-Bayt,” in EI2. 1010 The word shīʿa means “party,” referring to the partisans of Muhammad’s cousin ʿAlī, the fourth caliph. 1011 Madelung, “S̲ h̲ īʿa,” EI2. For the development of the doctrine of imamate, also see Liyakat Takim, The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shiʿite Islam (New York: The State University of New York Press, 2006), 24-30, et passim; Etan Kohlberg, “From imāmiyya to ithnā-ʿashariyya,” BSOAS 39, no. 3 (1976): 521-34; 1012 Brown, Hadith, 123-49. For an extensive treatment of the development of the Twelver shīʿī doctrine based on the traditions of the imāms, see Andrew Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shīʿism: Ḥadīth as Discourse between Qum and Baghdad (Surrey: Curzon, 2000).

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Such intellectual prestige of families attracted scholars and the pious to households in pursuit of knowledge. As discussed in Chapter 1, many members of Muhammad’s family and his Companions narrated stories about Muhammad, the occasions of his qur’ānic revelation, and his exhortations to visitors and those who seek knowledge. For example, al-Zuhrī, the famous eighth-century ḥadīth scholar, is reported to have interviewed servants in Medinan households for their knowledge and memory of the Prophet. 1013 Such household interviews, as also observed in the Christian tradition, resulted in the emergence, expansion, and dispensation of numerous traditions. At first sight one might have the impression that in Islam these traditions, as far as one can deduct from the reports, were mostly about Muhammad. But they were also about pre-Islamic prophets and saints, either in the form of knowledge about the pre-Islamic past, or in the form of quotations from

Muhammad, who narrated stories of biblical and extra-biblical stories. Either way, many families were the sources of Christian hagiographical knowledge.

The discussion on household knowledge and its dissemination underlines that local knowledge was not a fixed phenomenon.1014 Examples of narrative transmission often bring to fore the mobility of traditions traveling far and wide. The context that is repeatedly emphasized for this mobility that catalyzed cultural transmission is scholarly travels. It is an extensive topic that is beyond the confines of this project.1015 Nevertheless, we must

1013 Judd, Religious Scholars, 57. 1014 For the notion of non-fixity of local knowledge, see Nicholas Purcell, “Fixity” in Mobility and Travel in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, eds. Renate Schlesier and Ulrike Zellmann (Münster: Lit, 2004), 73-84, esp. 77. 1015 For a recent review and treatment of the topic, see John Voll, “Scholars in networks: ʿAbd al- Ghanī al-Nābulusī and his travels,” in The Heritage of Arabo-Islamic Learning: Studies Presented to Wadad Kadi, eds. Maurice Pmerantzand Aram Shahin (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016), 333-51.

317 emphasize medieval Muslim authors’ emphasis on traveling on the path of seeking knowledge. The sources our authors cited, the master-disciple networks they belonged to, the patronages under which they wrote all point to a massive map of medieval travel, stretching from the Iberian peninsula to India, from Asia Minor to south Arabia and

Ethiopia. Specific, local examples of hagiographical transmission took us to an immense degree of non-locality and ecumenicism of the knowledge of saints.

As a final note on the contexts of transmission, let us consider agencies and intentionalities. Based on the abovementioned mechanisms that facilitated the transmission of saints’ stories into Islam, and especially based on the audiences of stories, we can speak about two modes of transmission: ad-hoc and intentional. Ad-hoc is the transmission that takes place as a result of everyday interactions, the primary purpose of which is not always a conscious project or agenda of interreligious transmission. A great extent of interreligious transmissions in antiquity were of this sort, as people moved through their daily lives, practices, routines, and interactions. Stories circulating in contexts like liturgy, preaching, debate were transmitted between persons and communities in ad-hoc ways most of the time. Intentional transmission, on the other hand, is the one in which somebody actively seeks out a story. The trope of Wahb b. Munabbih going to Christian monasteries and translating books, or al-Zuhrī interviewing households in Medina to collect prophetic reports, would be of this category. These two modes can also be thought as interactive and transactional, respectively. The former type would be transmissions resulting from daily interactions between peoples and communities. The latter would be transmissions as cultural transactions, which connotes the presence of a certain degree of active demand,

318 expectation, and investment. Not every interaction was a transaction, and this difference can be reflected upon the ad-hoc and intentional modes of transmission.

5.4. Saints and their stories in non-literary contexts: A gesture towards future research

In the limited space of this project I analyzed a group of texts, and many trajectories my questions took me to are left underexplored. For example, an extensive analysis of sacred spaces in which Christians and Muslims venerated holy men and women is an indispensable component of this project, an inquiry that has been raised in a number of works.1016 In related vein, it is of topmost importance to analyze shared material culture beyond sacred spaces and landscapes. To what degree were objects related to saint veneration in Christianity, such as icons, relics, decorative plates, flasks, fabrics, apotropaic objects, etc., transmitted to Islam together with (or independent from) saints’ stories? And more broadly, what are some possible relations between stories/texts and religious practice?

Jamal Elias, in his monograph Aisha’s Cushion, extensively analyzes various traditions regarding pictorial representations in Islam.1017 He emphasizes that for the early

Islamic community “Christianity and its material and intellectual environment were living concerns.” 1018 Thus, Muslim engagement with and reaction to Christian pictorial

1016 Some of the prominent examples are: Fowden, Barbarian Plain; Ayoub, “Common saints and shrines,” 103- 115; Wolper, “Khiḍr,” 309–22; Fowden, “Sharing Holy Places,” 124–46; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 85-134. 1017 Jamal Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 1018 Ibid., 84-85.

319 representations, devotional objects, and other material culture were significant aspects of

Christian-Muslim encounters. Elias’ analysis demonstrates, for example, how iconographic representations, like those of prophets and of Mary, were found on textiles and other media in early Islam.1019 Depending on the context and use of that representation, the image and the object that carried the image were often recontextualized, reinterpreted, and negotiated. To exemplify further: Although not about a Christian persona but about

Moses, there are two reports in the collection of Hammām b. Munabbih, in which we see that certain objects in a landscape (a burial and a stone in these two reports) are associated with stories about Moses.1020 Art objects, in Elias’ words, were “technological products that serve as mediums of communication within societies,” 1021 and the early Islamic society, with its intricate relations with the other religious traditions, was not an exception.

The examples indicate that in the processes of negotiating pictorial representations, as well as other forms of material culture, the stories the objects were communicating were remembered and retold. Thus, an extensive analysis of material culture as an extension of the narratological universe is indispensable.

Stories were not only associated with material culture, but also with ritual practice.

I will give one example to this: We have seen the story of the Youths (Seven Sleepers) of

Ephesus in Chapter 2. A brief overview of the extra-qur’ānic reiterations and representations of this story shows the deep and continuous imprint this story left in Islamic cultural production, artistic expressions, and even ritual practice. The legend is reiterated

1019 Ibid., 1-2, 9-13. For anecdotes about depictions of Jesus and Mary in the fourteenth century Asia Minor, see ibid., 98-99. For icons of Mary, Jesus, and Abraham in the Kaʿba, see Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 552; Khan, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, vol. 4, book 55, § 570, §571. 1020 Hamidullah, Sahifah Hammam ibn Munabbih, 128-29 (§59, §60). 1021 Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, 289.

320 in numerous texts, which found direct pictorial reverberations. Among the better known visual representations of the legend is found in a twelfth-century work, Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm al-

Nishāburī’s Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā depicting the Youths in a cave, with the dog (white, spotted), a detail extensively discussed in the exegetical tradition 1022 Moreover, multiple sites that are identified as the cave of the Youths are venerated as a sacred space by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.1023

The story also appears to have impacted sufi ritual practice. Ibn al-ʿArabī, the aforementioned thirteenth-century sufi master, whom we saw in Chapter 4, mentions the

Seven Persons in his Rūḥ al-quds.1024 The author says: “I met them at Mecca, may God benefit all Muslims by them. I sat with them at a spot between the wall of the Hanbalites and at the bench of zamzam. They were indeed the elect of God. So overwhelmed were they by holy Tranquility (sakīna) and awe that they did not blink their eyes. When I met them, they were in a state of contemplation. No word passed between me and them on any matter, but I saw in them an almost unimaginable calm.” The sight of the seven holy men who are in an inconceivable calm and tranquility to the awe of their beholders reminds us the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The sufi practice of silence and tranquility was of course developed upon ascetic, particularly hesychastic, practices long known in the

1022 Isḥāq b. Ibrāhīm al-Nishāburī, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā [Tales of the Prophets], copied in 1577, in digitized format in the World Digital Library, open access at http//www.wdl.org/en/item/7494, p.186 (accessed 12.12.2018). Note that in a sixteenth century Persian manuscript further details were added to the representation, such as the Roman soldiers surrounding the cave, and the inscription at the entrance of the cave placed by two men. 1023 Massignon, “Culte liturgique et populaire,” 109-80; idem., “Septs dormants d’Éphèse,” 59- 112; Jourdan, Tradition des sept dormants. 1024 Austin, Sufis of Andalusia, 141-2.

321 eastern Mediterranean.1025 Nevertheless, in this instance the number seven, and the sleep- like transcendent state these divinely-chosen holy men were in, closely resonate with the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. It is likely that this sufi practice was interpreted and developed further in light of the widely circulating legend in the Islamic tradition. This example highlights that mimesis in Islamic piety was not only connected to Muhammad’s sunna,1026 but also to broader hagiographical traditions. Since many of these traditions had continuous connections and conversations with the Christian tradition, as this project highlighted, ritual practice is brought to fore as a shared and comparative space between

Christians and Muslims.

1025 For a recent review of this practice in Christianity, see Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, “Perfection, Imperfection and Stillness in Late Antique Syriac Christianity,” in Arise, Walk through the Land: Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Land of Israel in Memory of Yizhar Hirschfeld on the Tenth Anniversary of his Demise, eds. Joseph Patrich, Orit Peleg-Barkat, Erez Ben-Yosef (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2016), 227-34. For the development of hesychastic practice in sufism, see Vincent Rossi, “Presence, participation, performance: The remembrance of God in the early hesychast fathers,” in Paths to the Heart, ed. Cutsinger, 64-111; James Cutsinger, “Hesychia: An orthodox opening to esoteric ecumenism,” in Paths to the Heart, ed. Cutsinger, 225-251. 1026 Analyzed in Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill; London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

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CONCLUSION

Saints’ stories was a shared space between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, a space in which a common hagiographical language was used to articulate memories of the past, concerns regarding the present, and hopes and fear for the future. For both Christian and Muslim communities, this project asked a number of questions: How do saints’ stories reach broad audiences? What does a story do for its audiences, real and imagined? How and why is a story transmitted across confessional boundaries? I sought answers to these questions in light of Christian and Islamic texts, written on a broad chronological spectrum from the fourth to the fourteenth century.

The starting point of this research was the practice of orally narrating saints’ stories in antiquity, a practice for which I coined the term hagiodiegesis as a counterpart to hagiography. A literary analysis of late antique, Syriac and Greek, Christian hagiography demonstrated the contexts, agents, contents, audiences, and extent of this practice in antiquity. Storytelling, practiced by lay and monastic people, men and women, in urban and monastic contexts, was a powerful performance for exegesis, debate, instruction, admonition, and entertainment. Narrative was a space where people met, exchanged ideas, created meaning. Through the medium of storytelling, I argue, many saints’ stories were created, expanded, altered, and reached their audiences. Again, through this medium, more than through scribal practices, were stories transmitted across communities and vast geographies.

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A narratological reading of the Qur’ān, as well as other genres of Islamic literature added immensely to our reconstruction of storytelling in antiquity. I demonstrated

Muhammad as a transmitter, narrator, and interpreter of biblical-hagiographical stories, participating in the broader scriptural universe of late antiquity. The analysis also shows the multivocality in the early Islamic community. Stories of Christian saints, as well as biblical prophets, were already known in the community around Muhammad, and his audience contested, contextualized, complemented, and inquired about his preaching with the already extant knowledge of Christian traditions. A solid understanding of this multivocality takes us out of the discourses of “influence of biblical traditions on Islam” and “informants of Muhammad.” Muhammad, as well as other charismatic people in the community, narrated stories of pre-Islamic prophets and saints, as well as those of

Muhammad and his prophetic career. The reconstruction of late antique hagiodiegesis, and the early Islamic community as a participant of it, highlights that as the Christian background helps reconstruct the early Islamic community, a deep understanding of

Muhammad’s prophetic career and the Qur’ān as a late antique text is essential in developing our understanding of the sociology of late antiquity.

There was an increasing knowledge of and engagement with Christian hagiography in Islamic communities throughout the Middle Ages. As modern scholarship emphasized heretofore, a great extent of this engagement was in the realm of qur’ānic hermeneutics. Muslim exegetes and scholars appear to have acquired an extensive knowledge of Christian traditions, as well as Jewish, in order to elucidate many qur’ānic narratives, personas, and expressions. My analysis of the narratives in the sūrat al-kahf

(Q18) demonstrates that Muhammad’s preaching involved a substantial knowledge of

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Christian hagiography, and it assumed a similar knowledge on part of his audiences. In the following centuries, Muslim exegetes built on this communal knowledge, most possibly through Christian orature and homiletic milieu, utilizing it towards the exegesis of the

Qur’ān.

The exegesis of the Qur’ān, however, was by no means the only function Christian hagiography fulfilled in Islamic literature. Texts from Islamic historiography, belles- lettres, theology, travel literature, among others, show that Muslim authors continued transmitting Christian biblical and hagiographical stories, reorienting them towards multiple audiences and purposes. Didactic exhortation, praising towns or regions through their sanctified pasts, explaining etiological roots of Islamic practices and landscapes, as well as defining and confining the eternal Muslim community appear as the four major non-qur’ānic roles Christian hagiography played in Islam.

I have analyzed Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s use of the hagiographical knowledge pertaining to the dossier of St. Antony of Egypt in his work on fear of God and confidence in deed, namely, the Wajal. This example brings nuance to our understanding of shared authorship in hagiography, and the notion of pseudepigraphy in a milieu in which numerous authors,

Christian and Muslim, were using shared hagiographical knowledge in a common literary marketplace. The story of St. George in the universal history of al-Ṭabarī exemplifies a deep-rooted Islamic literary practice, namely, presentation of pre-Islamic saints as members of the eternal Muslim community. The difference between this representation and

Ibn al-Azraq’s use of the Life of St. Marūthā demonstrates that in certain cases Christian saints stayed as Christian saints in Islamic literature, especially when the Christian origins of a practice or a landscape had meaning and value for the Muslim author. Ibn al-Azraq’s

325 presentation of Marūthā highlights the local pride associated with the Christian-Roman past of his hometown, Maypherqat. We have also seen the use of the Alexander Legend, especially its Christian version, in a local historiography of south Arabia, in Ibn Hishām’s

Tījān. This example underlines that in many cases of transmission where we identify

“shared tropes,” there are in fact complex mechanisms of reiteration, obliteration, and reorientation of stories.

The reception history of the fifth-century Syriac story of Paul of Qenṭos and John of Edessa across Islamic literature until the fourteenth century further demonstrates that hagiographical transmissions between Christianity and Islam were not one-time exchanges that can be traced back to a particular time of contact, place, and two corresponding parties.

Transmission was an on-going continuum of conversation and exchange. We have seen the story of Paul and John, renamed in Islam as Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ, recontextualized in the biography of Muhammad, qur’ānic exegesis, universal history, and sufi literature. Each of these reiterations, despite not making any significant change in the narrative, added to the reception, memory, and literary dossier of these two saints. The story was interpreted and given a new semiotic value in each of these Islamic texts, which points to an ongoing conversation between Christian and Islamic literature, hagiology, and comparative notions of sanctity.

The examples analyzed above not only highlight the extents of Christian hagiographical knowledge in Islam across centuries, but also bring to fore significant mechanisms underlying the processes of hagiographical transmission between Christianity and Islam. The practice of storytelling, family-based piety and scholarship, the court culture, scholarly travels all functioned as prominent contexts of transmission, while

326 notions such as authority, authorship, Islamic perception of Christians (ascetics, monks, monasteries, etc.) were developed and complicated. This study also opens new avenues for future research directions, such as the role of material culture in interreligious transmission, and the intricate relationship between narrative and ritual practice.

Silence in such analysis is often a significant indicator itself. What the primary sources do not reveal requires attention, and my research has important silences. For example, other than Mary the mother of Jesus, I have not found any Christian saintly women’s stories transmitted to Islam. It is difficult to imagine, however, that such transmissions simply did not take place. Al-Harawī’s aforementioned Kitāb al-Ishārāt, for example, mentions biblical women’s (especially Mary) shrines venerated by Muslims.1027

It is highly likely that non-biblical women saints were also transmitted into Islamic popular piety. Exploration of local historiographies and popular piety, which I briefly discussed in

Chapter 5, might resolve this peculiar silence.

Another absence is that the examples I have analyzed do not yield any significant functionalist observation. In other words, there are no repeating patterns with regard to chronological or geographical distribution of transmission of saints’ stories, neither regarding the media or form of transmission, that overarch all of these examples. One common denominator is that all of the saints, whose stories were transmitted to Islam, are from the pre-Islamic times. Other than this, there are no observable relationalities between the Christian saints’ provenance and time period and its appearance in Islamic literature.

1027 Meri, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, 24 (a village mosque founded upon the tomb of Umm Maryam), 106 (a mosque founded at the site where Jesus and Mary resided for seven years), 250 (a garden attributed to Muhammad, close to the site which contains the place where Moses prayed for Jethro’s daughters, the tomb of Moses’ wife, and the tomb of Moses’ mother).

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St. George, St. Marūthā, St. Antony, Youths of Ephesus; these are certainly all prominent saints in Christianity. But renown does not seem to be the main explanation as to why their stories found their way into Islamic literature. To compare, the hagiographical traditions of

St. Simeon the Stylite, despite being widely venerated in the Near East and beyond, before and after the emergence of Islam, found only brief mentions in Islamic literature. It is the personal circumstances of storytellers, folklorists, scholars, and their travels and access to the knowledge of the past that facilitated conversation and transmission. This individuality prevents us from making generalizations, and keeps our focus on the particulars of cases of transmission.

A growing knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam, gradually built upon an already-existent knowledge in the earliest Islamic community, created space for exchange, conversation, debate, and differentiation between Christianity and Islam in the Middle

Ages. Christians and Muslims remembered different versions of the same past. These remembrances, carried through the powerful vessel of the narrative, were significant tools for prescribing communal identity, defining orthopraxy, establishing historical knowledge, and claiming religious authority. While in their specific contexts stories served such functions, in the long-term continual remembrance and re-telling of saints’ stories added to an ever-growing, incremental memory and legacy of saints and friends of God across centuries and beyond specific confessional communities. In this shared space, the building blocks of which were saints and their stories, Christian and Muslim communities rubbed shoulders while looking out of different windows at different horizons of the same ecumene.

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APPENDIX: NARRATIVESCAPE OF THE QUR’ĀN

Sūra name Sūr Notes on the narrative content a # 1st Meccan al-ʿalaq 96 “Recite in the name of your Lord who created” (v1) ca. 610-15 al-muddaththir 74 al-masad 111 quraysh 106 al-kawthar 108 al-humaza 104 al-māʿūn 107 al-takāthur 102 al-fīl 105 The general outlines of the Event of the Elephant (v1-5) al-layl 92

al-balad 90 al-sharḥ 94 “Did we not expand your breast, and lift from you your burden that weighed heavily upon your back?” (v1-3), reminiscent of the biblical story of Moses

al-ḍuḥā 93

al-qadr 97

al-ṭarīq 86

al-shams 91 Brief note on Thamūd's destruction when they

hamstrung the she camel (v11-15)

ʿabasa 80

al-qalam 68 The first use of “asāṭīr al-awwalīn” (v15)

The Companion of the Fish (Jonah) mentioned (v48)

al-aʿlā 87 “Truly this is in the scriptures of old, the scriptures of

Abraham and Moses” (v18-19)

329 al-tīn 95 al-ʿaṣr 103 al-burūj 85 The People of the Trench (v4-10) “have you heard the stories of Pharaoh and Thamūd?” (v17-18) al-muzzammil 73 Pharaoh’s punishment (v15-16) al-qāriʿa 101 al-zalzala 99 al-infiṭār 82 al-takwīr 81 al-najm 53 The scriptures of Moses and Abraham mentioned (v36-37) Ancient peoples’ destruction (v50-52) al-inshiqāq 84 al-ʿādiyāt 100 al-nāziʿāt 79 Moses (v15-26) – the first identifiable narrative,

referred to as ḥadīth “Truly in that is a lesson for whoever fears” (v26) al-mursalāt 77 al-naba’a 78 al-ghāshiya 88 al-fajr 89 ʿĀd, Iram of the pillars, Thamūd, Pharaoh listed

(v6-13) al-qiyāma 75 al-muṭaffifīn 83 The second occurrence of “asāṭīr al-awwalīn” (v13) al-ḥāqqa 69 ʿĀd, Thamūd and Pharaoh mentioned (v4-10) al-dhāriyāt 51 Abraham’s guests (v24-37) Moses (v38-40) ʿĀd (v41-42) Thamūd (v43-45) Noah (v46) (The narratives are referred to as ḥadīth.) al-ṭūr 52

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al-wāqiʿa 56 al-maʿārij 70 al-raḥmān 55 Narrative of Creation, heaven and hell, with a refrain al-ikhlāṣ 112 al-kāfirūn 109 al-falaq 113 al-nās 114 al-fātiḥa 1 2nd Meccan al-qamar 54 People of Noah (v9-16) ca. 615-18 ʿĀd (v18-21) Thamūd (v23-32) People of Lot (v33-40) House of Pharaoh (v41-42) al-ṣaffāt 37 Noah (v75-82) Abraham (v83-111) Isaac (v112-113) Moses and Aaron (v-114-122) Elias (v123-132) Lot (v133-138) Jonah (v139-148) nūḥ 71 Noah (v1-28) – first full narrative al-dukhān 44 People of Pharaoh (v17-31) People of Tubbaʿ (v37) qāf 50 Denying peoples listed (v12-14) ṭā-hā 20 Moses (v9-98) (qaṣṣa) Adam (v115-123) “we narrate unto you accounts” (v99) al-shuʿarā’ 26 Moses (v10-66) Abraham, Noah (v105-120) ʿĀd (v123-139) Thamūd (v141-158) Lot (v160-174) Shuʿayb (v176-189)

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(The terminology used is aḥādīth, and talawa.) al-ḥijr 15 Creation and Iblīs (v26-43) Abraham’s guests together with the story of Lot (v51- 74) Inhabitants of the thicket and of al-ḥijr (v78-84) maryam 19 Mary and Jesus (v2-37) (dhikr) Abraham’s prayer for his father (v41-50) Moses (v51-53) Ishmael (v54-55) Idrīs (v56-57) ṣād 38 Denying peoples listed (v12-14) David (v17-44) Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Elijah, Dhū al-Kifl (v45- 48) Iblīs’s rebellion (v71-85) yā-sīn 36 Anonymous story of People of the Town and messengers sent upon them (v13-29) zukhruf 43 Abraham (v26-28) Moses and Pharaoh (v46-56) Jesus (v5765) al-jinn 72 al-mulk 67 al-mu’minūn 23 Noah (v23-30) Anonymous prophet (v32-41) Moses (v45-49) Mary and Jesus (v50) al-anbiyā 21 Abraham (51-73) List of prophets and mention of their stories (v74-91, the last one is Mary, unnamed) al-furqān 25 “other people help Muhammad” (v4) “asāṭīr al-awwalīn recited to him morning and evening” (v5)

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Destruction of peoples of Moses, Noah and others (v35-39) al-isrā 17 Brief mention of Moses and Noah (v2-5, 17) Mention of the people of Thamūd (v59) Adam and Iblīs (v61-65) Moses (v101-106) al-naml 27 Moses, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (qaṣaṣ) (v7- 44) Ṣāliḥ (v45-53) Lot (v54-58) al-kahf 18 Companions of the Cave (v9-26) Rich man and the poor man (v32-44) Moses and his servant (v60-82) The two-horned (v83-99) The Qur’ān is called a ḥadīth. 3rd Meccan al-sajda 32 ca. 618-22 fuṣṣilat 41 ʿĀd (v15-16) Thamūd (v17-18) al-jāthiya 45 al-naḥl 16 God speaks to the bee (v68-69) and descriptions of other animals and plants created as signs Mention of an alleged informer of Muhammad (v103) Abraham (v120-122) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa.) al-rūm 30 hūd 11 Noah (v25-48) Hūd (v50-60) Ṣāliḥ (v61-68) Abraham (v69-76) Lot (v77-83) Shuʿayb (v84-95) Moses (v96-99)

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“These are among the stories we have recounted unto you” (v100) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa.) ibrāhīm 14 Moses (v5-8) A collective, generic account of other prophets (v9- 15) Dialogues between deniers, God and Iblīs, including the latter’s defense (v21-22) Abraham's plea for forgiveness of his parents (v35- 41) (The terminology used is dhikr) yūsuf 12 “We recount unto you the most beautiful of the stories” (v3) Joseph (v4-101) “these are among the accounts of the unseen which we reveal unto you.” (v102) “Certainly, in their stories is a lesson” (v111) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa and ḥadīth.) ghāfir 40 Moses (v23-46, other prophets are narrated within this story) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa.) al-qaṣaṣ 28 Moses and Pharaoh (v3-44) Moses and his people Korah (v76-82) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa and talawa.) al-zumar 39 al-ʿankabūt 29 Noah (v14-15) Abraham (v16-27, a commentary break in the story in v19-23) Lot (v28-35) Shuʿayb (v36-37) Destruction of other peoples, including Moses’ people (v38-39) (The terminology used is talawa.)

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luqmān 31 Luqmān (v12-13, in the rest, Muhammad and Luqmān merge as the speaker) al-shūrā 42 mention of Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus as receiving the same message (v13) yūnus 10 Noah (v71-73) Moses (v75-93) Jonah (v98) (The terminology used is talawa.) saba’a 34 David, Solomon and Sheba (v10-21) (aḥādīth) fāṭir 35 al-aʿrāf 7 Creation, Adam and Iblīs (v10-27) Dialogues between God, dwellers of heaven and those of hell (v37-51) Noah (v59-64) Hūd (v65-72) Ṣāliḥ (v73-79) Lot (v80-84) Shuʿayb (v85-95) Moses, Pharaoh, Aaron (v103-171) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa.) al-aḥqāf 46 Brother of ʿĀd (Hūd) (v21-25) al-anʿām 6 “asāṭīr al-awwalīn” (v25) Abraham and his father Azar (v74-83) Other prophets mentioned as a list (v84-87) (The terminology used is qaṣṣa.) al-raʿd 13 “recite unto them” (v30) (talawa) Medinan al-baqara 2 God setting forth a parable (v26) (mathal) ca. 622-32 Creation and God, angels, Adam, and Iblīs (v29-38) Pharaoh and Moses (v49-74, et passim) Mention of Jesus and the Holy Spirit (v87, v253) Abraham building the sanctuary (v124-150, et passim) āl ʿimrān 3 Mention of the punishment of Pharaoh (v11)

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Mary (v33-43) Jesus (v44-59) Abraham building the sanctuary (v95-97) The terminology used is qaṣṣa and talawa al-nisā’ 4 Mention of Abraham as God’s friend (v125) (qaṣṣa) Moses and his people (v153-155) Mention of slander against Mary (v156) Doketicism in Jesus’ crucifixion (v157-159) List of prophets (v163-165) Jesus doctrinology (v171-172); al-mā’ida 5 Moses and his people (v12-13, 20-26) (talawa) Adam’s two sons (v27-32) Dialogue between God and Jesus (v109-119) al-anfāl 8 al-tawba 9 Mention of stories of previous prophets and overthrown cities (v70) Mention of Abraham’s plea for forgiveness of his father (v114) al-ḥajj 22 Abraham’s building of the sanctuary and pilgrimage etiology (v26-28) List of prophets denied (v42-45) al-nūr 24 al-aḥzāb 33 List of prophets and those who disbelieve in them (v7-8) Mention of an event happened in Medina (v9-15) The story of Zayd (v37-40) muḥammad 47 al-fatḥ 48 al-ḥujurāt 49 al-ḥadīd 57 Mention of Noah and Abraham, through whom prophethood was established (v26) Jesus (v27) al-mujādila 58

336 al-ḥashr 59 al-mumtaḥana 60 Abraham’s asking for forgiveness for his father (v4- 5) al-ṣaff 61 Moses (v5) Jesus heralding to his people the messenger to come (v6) Jesus and the Apostles (v14) al-jumuʿa 62 al-munāfiqūn 63 al-taghābun 64 al-ṭalāq 65 al-taḥrīm 66 The wives of Noah and Lot as disbelievers(v10) The wife of Pharaoh and Mary as believing women (v11-12) (possibly as a hermeneutical tool for the short story about Muhammad and his wife in v3-9) al-insān 76 al-bayyina 98 al-naṣr 110

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