The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People

aziz al-azmeh

The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity Allāh and his People

THE E M E RGE N C E O F I S L AM I N L AT E A N T I QU I T Y

Based on epigraphic and other material evidence as well as more traditional literary sources and critical review of the extensive relevant scholarship, this book presents a comprehensive and innovative reconstruction of the rise of Islam as a religion and imperial polity. It reassesses the development of the imperial monotheism of the New Rome, and considers the history of the Arabs as an integral part of Late Antiquity, including Arab ethnogenesis and the emergence of what was to become Muslim monotheism, comparable with the emergence of other monotheisms from polytheistic systems. Topics discussed include the emergence and development of the Muh.ammadan polity and its new cultic deity and associated ritual, the constitution of the Muslim canon, and the development of early Islam as an imperial religion. Intended principally for scholars of Late Antiquity, Islamic studies and the history of religions, the book opens up many novel directions for future research. a z i z a l - a z m e h is CEU University Professor in the Department of History, and Director of the Centre for Religious Studies, Central European University, Budapest. Previous books (in English) are Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation (); Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies (); Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Christian, Muslim and Pagan Polities (); Islams and Modernities (rd edition, ); and The Times of History: Universal Themes in Islamic Historiography ().

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T H E E MERG E N CE OF I SL A M I N L AT E A N T I QUI T Y Allāh and his People

AZIZ AL-AZMEH

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C Aziz Al-Azmeh 

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First published  Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data ‘Azmah, ‘Aziz.

The emergence of Islam in late antiquity : Allah and his people / Aziz Al-Azmeh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (hardback) . Islam – History – To . . Islam – Origin. I. Title. bp.a  .′  – dc  isbn ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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ch a p te r 1

Late Antiquity and Islam Historiography and history

The purpose of this chapter is to set out the overarching historiographic parameters for the discussions to follow, and to draw a line connecting the various component chapters of this book. It aims to discuss salient elements of the scholarly context that led to the framing of the questions asked and for the constitution of the objects of research pursued. This book sustains the simple thesis that Islam emerged in a specific time and place, in the wake of the Byzantine–Sasanian wars and the subsequent breakdown of the southern limes of both empires, areas that had for two centuries been particularly susceptible to the resonances of events further north. The time at issue is a period that has come to be known as Late Antiquity, a period whose purchase extended beyond empires and beyond periodisation based upon imperial history alone. The place is at once the central node of the late antique system, the region of the east Mediterranean where late antique empires and imperial cultures flourished, and its extension into one of Late Antiquity’s marginal, ultra-limes zones, this being the pagan reservation of western Arabia that, with its paganism, represented an older form of continuity with Antiquity.

Neither Islam nor Late Antiquity constitutes by itself a topic of historical investigation. Each will need to have its parameters specified in terms of both time and place, and their various relationships of continuity, disjunction, inflection and refraction need to be deliberately investigated.

Both Islam and Late Antiquity are macro-historical categories that require deliberate attention as to their internal constitution and articulations, their temporal termini and their historical-geographical locations.

Scholarship on Late Antiquity has already sought to develop specifications regarding the mutations following Hellenistic and Latin Roman times, reacting to views which tend implicitly to regard this long period of time as either vacuous and inchoate, signalled by a loose use of the term ‘transition’, or else of the degeneration of classicism. This body of scholarship has also attempted, in a variety of ways, to relate Islam to newer 

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Late Antiquity and Islam

definitions of the late antique period. The scholarly context therefore appears to be promising, and somewhat ripe for a serviceable stock-taking and consideration both synthetic and analytical. This may offer the possibility that Late Antiquity might be used as an explanatory grid that would account for the conditions that made possible the emergence of Islam, an emergence for which a fiercely singular aspect is often claimed.

The setting of Late Antiquity Two issues arise immediately as one seeks to specify the parameters of both Late Antiquity and Islam, as they must arise in all macro-historical characterisations and denominations: categorisation and periodisation. The former, categorisation, requires considerations of internal morphology. The latter involves investigations of continuities and discontinuities: continuities and discontinuities not of some cultural or other essence constituting the morphology of the category in question, nor of overlying lines of genealogical filiation which are seen to assure continuities of essence.

Rather, one would need to look at historical legacies as offering a repertoire of social, political, cultural and other possibilities, which might develop into different permutations and combinations of elements in place. In other words, it will be argued that what was to become Islamic civilisation was in effect the regional civilisation of western Asia: not the cause or consequence of the late antique period, but its most successful crystallisation, with late antique empires providing the conditions for both its emergence and its initial crystallisation. Consequently, emphasis will be laid less on the far-fetched but persistent predisposition to interpret late antique Arabs and their religions in terms of the pre-Hellenistic, the so-called panBabylonian and, by extension, allegedly the proto-Semitic condition (in relation to which the contemporary witness of desert Arabs might be seen in terms of degeneration), when not seen entirely in terms of a uniqueness signalled by an exotic religion.

It will be argued in what follows that Islam forms an integral part of Late Antiquity in the sense that it instantiated, under the signature of a new universal calendar, two salient features which overdetermine – rather  Morony, Iraq, .  On which Albright, ‘Islam’,  ff. Pan-Babylonianism was the name given to caricature the very

widespread trend to interpret Oriental religions, and monotheistic religions by association, with reference to a primeval originality ascribed to Mesopotamian religion, and is one that will be encountered later. See Rogerson, Anthropology,  ff., and Marchand, German Orientalism,  ff.,  ff.

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The setting of Late Antiquity

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than constitute the ‘essence’ of – this period. These are monotheism and œcumenical empire, the conjunction of which, in constituting the history of this period, serves in very complex ways as its points of articulation and internal coherence. Both monotheism (in senses to be discussed in the next chapter) and empire might be termed Roman, or perhaps Late Roman; the relatively sparse reference to the Sasanians in the discussions that follow is due to the simple fact that their legacy made itself felt meaningfully only after the period of concern to us here, and that, unlike Byzantium, the Sasanian empire was more of a tributary state that, albeit defining itself dynastically and politically, did not seem as consistently to consider cultural and religious universalism as constituent elements in its understanding of empire. Both monotheism and empire are taken in a sense that abstains from the altogether common reflex to regard Rome, or any such macrohistorical category, as simply a figure of continuity with a classical past, or, in a wistful, stoical or passionate temper, to look at her history as one of decline and degeneration. It will also be argued that geography is crucial in this respect. Space needs to be weighted by time, in such a way that the spatial boundaries of the historical trajectory under consideration may be seen to dilate, contract or otherwise shift, as historical time works in concrete space. In this way, space will cease to be considered as a mere container and become 

Bearing in mind that the adjective ‘late’ is not taken generally to be altogether complimentary (Bowersock, ‘Vanishing paradigm’, ), and is used here for the convenience of general chronological indication. The same pejorative connotation applies to the French use of the term ‘Bas-Empire’ (Marrou, Saint Augustin, ).  Cf. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, , but see Dignas and Winter, Rome and Persia, –, which might be seen to be an exaggeration if one noted Sasanian respect for local religions (Flusin, Anastase, –, for Caesarea). Nevertheless, a schematic but not unconvincing case has been made for seventeen points of parallelism between the two empires: Morony, ‘Should Sasanian Iran’. Recent research has suggested forcefully that the Sasanian empire should rather be regarded as a Sasanian– Parthian confederacy with considerable baronial control by the older Parthian nobility over vast territories in the north and north-eastern ‘quarters’ of Sasanian domains than as a centralised state.

Further, moments of central religious control from the centre were evanescent, and the common model of a state-patronised and state-supported orthodoxy overseen by the Magi is compromised by the religious heterogeneity of Sasanian domains and the changing imperial tastes in matters of religion: Pourshariati, Decline and Fall, chs.  and , passim.  Cameron (‘Absence,’ ,  f.) has highlighted with exceptional clarity the institutional academic reticence, sensibilities and preferences relating to Late Antiquity: it is used by Roman historians in terms of contrast to what came before, as post-Roman; if used with Constantine as its starting point it speaks well to Orthodox and eastern agendas; it begs the question of Roman historians as to whether Justinian was Roman or Byzantine; if extended into the eighth century or later, it may cause itself to be avoided ‘because what comes later is Byzantium’. In all, choosing Late Antiquity over early Byzantium lays claim to both chronological and geographical space, as the period is, geographically, ‘probably’ Near Eastern or east Mediterranean, with the idea that the Arab conquests constituted a caesura now increasingly under the pressure of archaeological evidence to the contrary.

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Late Antiquity and Islam

relational, as historical space. Thus, in speaking of late Romanity, stock needs to be taken of the fact that its institutions, broadly considered, and their spatial distribution, along with their centres (the capital, the imperial residences, the sources of wealth and of cultural production, relevant population groups), were in a very real sense translated spatially as its centre of gravity shifted, thus involving the translocation, over time, of a historical category. One is thereby able to give determinate sense to the incongruity of regarding, for example, Greece as part of the Occident, and Morocco as part of the Orient. For indeed, it is the case that geographical metaphors of East and West, directly or indirectly, have played an oddly determinant role in the delimitations of Antiquity and Late Antiquity. These, bearers of mutual ‘otherness’, bear within themselves connotations that impede rather than aid the understanding, and famously muddy attempts at understanding Byzantium, let alone Islam. It will be seen in what follows that Islam is the end product of the translation of Romanity to the East, considered quite simply as a cardinal point unburdened of culturalist connotations, and that it is within the structures of Romanity that Islam, as it eventually evolved by a process described in this book, found its conditions of possibility: œcumenical empire with the salvific vocation of a monotheist religion, the two articulated symbolically by political theology and a theology of history. The system was underwritten by an œcumenical currency and urbanism, the whole package now expressed under a new signature and in a different language. In all, it will be suggested that Late Antiquity might benefit from considerations that would reinstate its Romanity, considered as a comprehensive imperial system, as this would restrain the culturalist, classicist interpretative drift written into the ‘antiquity’ component of this general title.

To this historical trajectory, and in the terms suggested, categories of Orient and Occident, of Europe and Asia, will be seen to matter little.

The overall thrust of these classificatory categories seems generally to be of  It is notable that only one emperor resided in Rome after ad  – Maxentius, from  to 

(Mitchell, Later Roman Empire, ).

 One may note a rather distorted perspective on the internal economy of spatial relations, including

centrality, from modern cartography based on the projection of Mercator and its later developments: Hodgson, Venture, . f.  McCormick, ‘Byzantium’, .  There is much work on empires. It will suffice here to recall a number of salient features of such

durable, large-scale political systems: limited differentiation of political goals across large territories, the relative autonomy of goals centrally set, control and deployment of free-floating resources, a dialectic of social and cultural congruence and incongruence across space, elite circulation over time, and administrative institutionalisation. See Eisenstadt, Political Systems, ch.  and passim.

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Mutation, decadence and religion

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figuring homeostatic continuities within, and disjunctive relations without. One might add that the frontiers and cardinal locations of Barbarians shifted over time. Nevertheless, Europe is generally used as a rhetorical figure, a historical synecdoche in which part and whole stand for one another, despite shifts which overcame territories involved in myriad oppositions between ethnic denominations that changed over time. It may well be remembered that Europe was a term originally used for navigational orientation in the Aegean, and did not correspond to the east/west division arising from political conflicts, nor to their use by the Roman imperial state as administrative terms.

Mutation, decadence and religion Delivering his inaugural lecture at Strasburg in , Fustel de Coulanges reproved the habit of classical scholarship of talking of ancient Greeks and Romans as if they were contemporary Englishmen and Frenchmen. It was indeed in terms of diminishing mimetic ability and decreasing ‘quant[a] of antiquity’, understood as cultural goods, that, like much else, the history of what would now be termed late antique art – including Byzantine – was conceived. These were quanta remaindered in a process of decline, with some anticipations of medieval art, and in both cases bereft of inner structure. It was in fact in the context of fin-de-siècle Austrian art history that the first attempts were made to disengage, by formal and stylistic analyses, specific features that characterised an art then called late Roman, spätrömisch and spätantik, without presuming decadence of decay or a standard ahistorical canon of beauty. Late Antiquity as a historical period 

Burke, ‘Did Europe exist’,  ff.; Fischer, Oriens–Occidens,  ff. Similar shifts can be seen in Eran/Aneran (on which now Fowden, Before and after Muhammad, . ff.) and Dār al-Islām/Dār al-H . arb.  Hay, Europe,  ff. It might be added that Aristotle (Politics, b) thought of the Greeks not as Europeans, but as having occupied a median position between Europe and Asia.  Fischer, Oriens–Occidens, , .  Fustel de Coulanges, ‘Ethos’, , .  Kazhdan and Cutler, ‘Continuity’, .  Kazhdan and Cutler, ‘Continuity’,  f.; Elsner, ‘Late antique art’, .  Demandt, Fall Roms,  ff.; Elsner, ‘Late antique art’,  f.; Hübinger, Spätantike, . It is Alois Riegl who is generally credited with this shift, introducing a formalistic vocabulary still current in art history: symmetry, frontality, rigidity, opticality, symbolism, and non-representational perspectives anticipating expressionism. In this sense he discovered Late Antiquity, without using the term consistently or terminologically (Fowden, Before and after Muhammad, ., ). At the same time, Josef Strzygowski worked more comprehensively towards decentring the classicising aesthetic presumptions in the study of late antique art, although this very wide-ranging work on late antique art was cast in the mode of degeneration and decline. It was he who coined the term late antique art in a work published in  under the title Orient oder Rom? Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken

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Late Antiquity and Islam

and as understood today is, in its turn, the product of the latter part of the century recently past, and is largely but not exclusively the product of what has been criticised as anglocentric scholarship. Reconsidering the question of decadence and decline was a primary signature of the emergent field of study termed Late Antiquity, now duly become an academic institution, albeit not yet a clear concept, as we shall see. There are evident problems with the classicising notion of history with which ideas of decline and decadence are correlative. It tends to vacate a long historical period of determinate content. In addition, there are conceptual problems relating to a romantic historiographic trope grounded in metaphorical thinking both organismic (with emphasis on classical robustness and integrity) and aesthetic (with emphasis on transhistorical value), tending to take metaphorical terms for actual historical processes. Closely connected with this last point is the view that, to cast change and transformation primarily – and on occasion exclusively – in terms of debasement and adulteration implies the tendency to apprehend the period designated as decadent by measurement against a classical norm rather than in terms of a historical dynamic which might comprehend both. Pertinent examples are some older studies of Augustine, whose verbal artistry was adjudged baroque and ornamental, devoid of classical solidity. Notions und frühschristlichen Kunst; but his reputation suffered much from his pan-Germanic sympathies: Elsner, ‘Birth’,  ff. ,  f.; Marchand, German Orientalism, , ,  ff.; Liebeschuetz, ‘Birth’, .  The first use of the term following its art-historical use is generally attributed to Gelzer’s ‘Altertumswissenschaft’, published in . Lietzmann (‘Spätantike’, passim) also used the term in the same year, and, though conceding the aptness of Riegl’s art-historical analyses in detail, believed that he had missed the general picture of Orientalisation and decline. In this sense, the concept can comprehend Islamic art as well as Islam as a phenomenon highlighting the answer of the East to Hellenism. Something analogous and avant la lettre was already noted by Becker with regard to Spengler (‘Spenglers’,  f.), despite his judgement that Spengler was a ‘Procrustes of history’.

Finally, Marrou attributes the term to Reitzenstein, without giving a reference (I have not been able to locate the item quoted), and notes that Burckhardt had used the term in a purely chronological sense: Liebeschuetz, ‘Birth’,  n. , and  for a glimpse at German Altertumswissenschaft in relation to this). The first appearances of the term in English seem to date from  and  (James, ‘Rise’, ).  Giardina, ‘Esplosione’,  n. . On the scholarship leading up to the making of Late Antiquity, see especially Vessey, ‘Demise’, Cameron, ‘A. H. M. Jones’, and the statements of the master practitioner and his colleagues in Brown et al., ‘World of Late Antiquity’. This point has been clearly and explicitly picked up by critics of Late Antiquity scholarship: Liebeschuetz, ‘Late antiquity’,  f. and passim.  See Demandt, Fall Roms, the theme being all the rage today (Ward-Perkins, ‘Decline’). On the scholarship of the decline of Antiquity and its antecedents, Momigliano, ‘Introduction’,  ff.; on the ‘dogged guerrilla warfare’ against the melodramatic accounts of classical decline in the academe, see Brown, ‘World of late antiquity’, , and cf. Liebeschuetz, ‘Birth’,  f.  Koselleck, Niedergang,  ff.; Starn, ‘Historical decline’, ; al-Azmeh, Times of History,  ff.  Marrou, Saint Augustin,  f., ,  ff.

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Mutation, decadence and religion

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of cultural degeneration also fall captive to a historiography of names that come to imply morphological stereotypes. Writing a history of names taken for cultural labels, to which characteristics are predicated, deploys a ‘hyper-referential’ concept of culture not only as a descriptive notion but as an explanatory grid; in this, time and place stand simply as markers, rather than elements of explanation. This is not an unusual procedure; it uses one or more foregrounded elements, often arbitrarily selected and described, as criteria for both the description and the explanation of a historical category, thus vitiating the possibility of addressing the complexity of large-scale historical categories. Ultimately and inevitably, this leads to conceiving historical change in terms of contamination, denaturation, miscegenation, and other conceptual implications of the organismic metaphor. Questioning the notion of decline and decadence in discussions of Late Antiquity yields considerations of a specific gravity and the particular historical lineaments of this period. These are what are primarily at issue here, notwithstanding the postmodernist temper which has been ascribed to late antique studies by both practitioners and critics. Apart from this sunny, and sometimes maudlin postmodernist temper and the drifts associated with it normally, it is crucial to signal the two central consequences of ascribing to Late Antiquity a proper constitution in historical terms other  

 Kuper, Culture, x–xi and passim; Mauss, ‘Civilisations’,  ff.

Cf. Heuß, ‘Antike’, ,  f.

Crisply described by Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies,  and passim), who also proposes a way of looking at decline in terms of the marginal returns of systemic complexity ( ff.). Cf. Mauss’ characterisation of a civilisation as a ‘hyper-social system of social systems’ (‘Civilisation’, ).  Marrou (Saint Augustin, , – n. ) described Spengler’s ‘pseudomorphs’ as ‘Gauche’. See Spengler, Decline, .. Note that this same procedure prescribes criteria of relevance and irrelevance for the inclusion and exclusion of historical materials in scholarship. One might mention, quite at random, materials that help the understanding of the ‘Greek miracle’ in terms of commonalities with the broader Near East: Burkert, Revolution,  ff. and passim, and Astour, ‘Greek names’, .  Bowersock, ‘Vanishing paradigm’,  ff., ; Cameron, ‘“Long” late antiquity’, .  Practitioners (Cameron, ‘“Long” late antiquity’) have invoked Edward Said and the ‘strategies and techniques’ of post-colonial studies, including multiculturalism, as well as postmodernist relativism and due recognition of ‘the periphery’ (Bowersock, ‘Vanishing paradigm’,  and ‘Centrifugal forces’, ). For his part, Brown (World, ,  ff.,  ff., ) characterised the ‘greatest political achievement’ of Late Antiquity as the transformation of ‘the average provincial’ into a ‘citizen’ of the empire, and saw the period as one which somehow empowered the demos by its adoption of a middlebrow culture, and indeed of a ‘Cockney culture’, encapsulated in the Holy Man; he regarded monasticism as the bridgehead which brought fringes of Antiquity (Syria and Egypt) into the culture and politics of the empire: cf. Vessey, ‘Demise’,  ff. and Ruggini, ‘All’ombra’.

These views have certain concordances with Momigliano, ‘Introduction’, ,  ff., . Critics have made the point that these views are expressed in clichés (Athanassiadi, ‘Antiquité tardive’,  ff.; Liebeschuetz, ‘Late antiquity’, , ), and have in their turn been accused of ‘transparent nostalgia for the ideological historiography of an earlier era’ (Bowersock, ‘Centrifugal forces’, ). Indeed, one critic of Late Antiquity studies regrets the restraint of professional, disciplinary turf divisions occasioned by the inclusivist attitudes of Late Antiquity scholarship (Giardina, ‘Esplosione’, ).

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Late Antiquity and Islam

than those of degeneration. The one is precisely the move to what had long been taken for the ‘periphery’, understood here not so much as a postmodernist or sub-alternist evocation of marginality, but as a re-conception and reclamation of what was historically central. This was characterised above as the geographical weighting of temporality – with emphasis on both transformation and relocation, as well as on the spatial specification of issues discussed. Broad historiographic strokes apart, such claims for atrophy and the disappearance of ancient learning are counter-factual: Late Antiquity, including Romanity, was not exclusively Graecophone, and recent work has shown very clearly and amply how ancient learning flourished energetically with high technical accomplishment in the medium of Syriac. This was a full dress rehearsal of the much better known story of later Arabic learning, both representing full continuity with secular late antique learning, in different linguistic registers existing in territories largely overlapping with those of Late Antiquity. Clearly, a shift in perspective is in order.

The other is the revaluation of religion, the reassessment of the period in some general way as the Theopolis, to use Marrou’s somewhat hyperbolic term, with an accent on culture, specifically religious culture, one, moreover, not confined to Christianity, but pre-dating it in late Roman paganism. It will be noted that in this revaluation of religion a novel positive spin is put on one aspect of history that Gibbon, like later authors, declared to be retrograde and irrational, and that had been one of the views of the late antique period that prompted the scholarship under discussion here. This strong emphasis on matters religious in late antique studies has been criticised for taking place at the expense of politics and



Bowersock, ‘Dissolution’,  ff.,  ff. The claim that contemporary Late Antiquity studies are, in addition, born of underlying concerns with European integration (James, ‘Rise’,  f.) is relevant to this argument.  Tannous, Syria,  ff. and chs.  and , passim.  Marrou, Saint Augustin,  ff., who, though deploring the possible interpretation of ‘civilisation’ as an equivalent to the German ‘Kultur’ and its dreaded connotations, nevertheless identifies the two conceptually, albeit implicitly: Vessey, ‘Demise’, .  See Marrou, Décadence romaine,  ff.  Cf. Liebeschuetz, ‘Late antiquity’, ,  n. , who detects in this an affinity to postmodernism, and Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, . This point is recognised by Bowersock (‘Vanishing paradigm’, ), and cf. Vessey, ‘Demise’, , who speaks of using Gibbon’s tools without his prejudices.

Of these ‘prejudices’, it is worth noting that, like many of his contemporaries, Gibbon offered a positive evaluation of Muh.ammad and his religion – thought to be a humanist religion without much superstition or a clerisy – as a foil to Christianity and its church (Lewis, ‘Gibbon’,  f. and passim).  Cf. Cameron, ‘Redrawing the map’,  ff. and Dodds, Greeks, , 

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Mutation, decadence and religion

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institutions, as a result of which Late Antiquity historians have ‘taken over’ the early history of Christianity from theologians and Patristic scholars. Needless to say, this emphasis on a religion that not only was to become ‘theopolitical’, but also was profoundly internalised in the spirits and lives of ordinary people, with emphasis on self-grooming, on the creation of ‘textual communities’, indeed producing for one scholar a ‘new axial age’. Such a perspective encourages the possibility for the relative effacement of social history as its historical dynamics are reconfigured around religious developments, implicitly taken to constitute the new cultural signature of the period. Culture and society might thereby be brought together in such a way ‘as to leave scarcely any daylight between them’, both being regarded as aspects of religion. This lack of distinction is generally characteristic of studies of Muslim history, conceptually homologous to classicising studies of cultures (the Greek, the Roman, the Arab, the Muslim), and inextricably connected to romantic and organismic views of history. But such theocentric enthusiasm need not necessarily be made central, nor was it entirely an invention of what has come to be Late Antiquity, not least in its Christian or Christianising redactions. Scholars of Late Antiquity realise that religion, and ‘ferocious self-grooming’, were not confined to Christianity, but had also marked aspects of Late Roman paganism. The growing salience of religion, in other words, needs to be regarded as the distinguishing feature of the later Roman empire, a state of ‘extraordinary tenacity’. If we consider Late Antiquity as a period when ‘ancient traditions were being decanted’, and if we were to read through this metaphor, charming or grim according to one’s reading of it, then we shall be impelled to inquire into the end product of this process of decantation and its resulting consistency. We shall also need to look into how the later purchase of such 

Giardina, ‘Esplosione’,  and passim; Athanassiadi, ‘Antiquité tardive’,  ff., who also (), like other critics, comments on the seductiveness of Peter Brown’s style. The revaluation of religion is of course common today, and the mellifluous fascination with rustic superstition, and with the irrational generally, is part of the package.  Cameron, ‘Long late antiquity’,  f., with a positive attitude. It is little wonder that Late Antiquity has found favour among many Byzantinists (see ibid., ).  Stroumsa, Sacrifice,  ff., ,  ff., .  Vessey, ‘Demise’, , with reference to Peter Brown. Cameron (Mediterranean,  ff., ) has warned in detail against simply regarding Late Antiquity as an ‘age of spirituality’.  Al-Azmeh, Times of History,  ff.,  ff.  For instance, Cameron, ‘Redrawing the map’,  ff.  Cameron, Mediterranean,  ff. Mitchell (Later Roman Empire, ) has shown how, despite debilitating wars and an extraordinary series of natural catastrophes, the imperial administration continued to function impressively through the second half of the sixth century.  Le Goff, Purgatory, .

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residues as remained were sedimented, bearing in mind all the while that, in matters historical, the consequential application, without residue, of general categories of nomenclature and associated description is as facile as the deployment stereotypes. The ease with which ‘ideal types’ become stereotypes is well known.

Yet late antique scholarship has little explicit truck with this stereotypical patterning of the historical understanding, it being generally given to a certain descriptivism, sometimes of thick description. Yet its concern with religion as a structuring element during the period, in less subtle hands, could be seen as implicitly reinstating a substantivist element in its construction of a historical category. It is little wonder that Late Antiquity has been described as an elliptical formula artificially confected to mark a historical period requiring the filling of a chronological deficit. Scholarship on Late Antiquity repudiates an understanding of the period as being merely transitional. Yet it remains in many important ways captive to its polemical beginnings, and uses as a defensive strategy, often obliquely, the notion of transition, yielding an understanding dependent for its constitution upon earlier classicism, ‘antiquity’, the primary element qualified by lateness. When unreflected, this notion remains captive to a literary and cultural understanding of antiquity of venerable scholarly vintage. Marrou noted this possible problem, but proposed that the solution needed to be normative, suggesting simply that a positive connotation of the term ‘late’ should be adopted and that this ‘other antiquity’ should, when regarded on its own, be characterised as a ‘mutation’. Late Antiquity, a period of metamorphosis, is in this perspective still antique, but ‘irreducible’ to Antiquity. In other words, the situation does not appear to be substantively different from that prevailing in  when Gelzer first put the term Spätantike into circulation, lamenting the fact that it was regarded merely as the end of Antiquity or the beginning of the Middle Ages. So what is it precisely that was the subject of change and mutation, and what was it that might be considered to have constituted the differentia of Late Antiquity, thereby coming to constitute this period as an intelligible historical unit, apart from signalling the recognition of change unrelated  

Athanassiadi, ‘Antiquité tardive’, , .

This point is well brought out by Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’,  ff. See Clover and Humphreys, ‘Towards a definition’, in Tradition . In practical terms, one sees this indeterminacy institutionally translated into philological and epigraphic projects concerning late antique topics carried out in the usual manner of classical studies (Solignac, ‘Rencontre’).  Cf. Heuβ, ‘Antike’, .  Marrou, Décadence romaine,  f.  Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’, .  Gelzer, ‘Altertumswissenschaft’, .

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Antiquity and Late Antiquity in space and time

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to contemporary aesthetic preferences? How are the temporal termini of Late Antiquity construed, irrespective of how rough the chronology must be in these circumstances? And, last but not least, precisely how do time and space relate in the perception of this historical period?

Clearly, a proper definition of the period cannot rest content with identifying the differentia without addressing the genus. And clearly, again, Late Antiquity would be incomplete, and would lend itself to incoherence and to a blurred definition, if one did not include in this definition the persistences that subtend its connection with Antiquity. On closer scrutiny, it would appear that the binding element of the two phases of Antiquity assumed in the definition, the classical and the late, would be seen to reside in the persistence, not of art and letters, although this is not in itself inconsiderable yet might easily drift towards the perception of decline, but rather of imperial Romanity with its Hellenistic culture, and its later linear extensions in Constantinople and Damascus. Identifying the binding element of a historical trajectory would clarify the general conditions under which changes took place; the invocation of Romanity has much systemic explanatory force and, when shorn of the temptation for denial, would emerge as the sine qua non for explaining the emergence of imperial systems with an œcumenical vocation, including the Caliphate.

Antiquity and Late Antiquity in space and time By token of its very name, Late Antiquity appears to be a term that not only follows, but also preserves certain constituent elements of its earlier vintage. For some, it preserves the ‘legacy’ of Antiquity. After all, it is a late redaction of Antiquity by definition, preserving, among other things, Roman law and Christian institutions, quite apart from architectural and other elements, to which might be added the persistence of paideia.

Despite the political upheavals of the Antonine and Severan periods and of the Barbarian invasions in the West, the Roman state had been preserved as a legal entity, hence in continuity, until the establishment of the Lombard state in Italy, the dissolution of the res publica under Justinian and, later, the rise of Islam. The model of late Romanity in circulation had generally highlighted continuities of the cultural order – hence ‘antiquity’ – and resorted to external factors in accounting for change, most importantly the incursions of mainly Germanic external proletariats. To what extent this  

 Gelzer, ‘Altertumswissenschaft’,  f.

Marrou, Décadence romaine,  ff.  Gelzer, ‘Altertumswissenschaft’,  ff.

Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’, .

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externalist explanation, as distinct from descriptions of Late Antiquity’s internal coherence, was shed by work following that of Peter Brown, and to what extent a ‘provincial’ rather than an Italic criterion of reference was consequentially adopted, and in what way, is debatable, and will be considered further below.

The reclamation of Antiquity has generally been given to a revaluation of Late Antiquity’s literary and religious output, and there does not seem to have been much echo of more deliberately reflexive proposals to configure Late Antiquity systematically according to criteria of differential temporality – and hence differential periodisation – which might account for the ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, artistic, social, economic and juridicopolitical transformations, continuities and breaks. Some elements of such a broad view have been independently proposed in broad strokes, such as continuous urbanism. But in all cases, the predominant trend has been culturalist – albeit of a demotic rather than the bourgeois character preferred by a Marrou or a Rostovtzeff. Scholarship has generally been caught up in the supposition that the period was transitional, that it looked not only backwards towards classical antiquity, but also forwards towards the Middle Ages: the ‘local’ or parochial Middle Ages in contrast to cosmopolitan Antiquity, or the ‘medieval cultures’ of Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West, engrossed in a ‘souci de soi’. In virtually no case do we have the full counterpart of the systemic case made for decline. It must be admitted that the model of differential temporality not only is complex, but might, if no articulating element were identified, be incoherent chronologically. Thus, if one were to consider the theme of continuous urbanism, one would need to extend the period backwards to Alexander or, more restrictively and in awareness of possible problems thereby arising, propose the period ad – for the span of Late Antiquity, being the period during which the most dramatic transformations took place. A recent proposition by Fowden suggests that, on criteria of religious history, a more useful term would be the Millennium, from Augustus to c. .   

Cf. Cameron, ‘A. H. M. Jones’, , .

See above all Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’, –.

Clover and Humphreys, Tradition,  ff. For a review of this topic, Kazhdan and Cutler, ‘Continuity and discontinuity’,  ff. Again, one should be wary of succumbing to the romanticising drift of the idea of the polis as free and autonomous. In actual fact poleis formed component parts of leagues and empires and were subject to their imperatives in many ways. One should also be attentive to how the poleis were handled in the ancient sources, these including Punic Carthage and Babylon: van der Spek, ‘Babylonian city’,  ff. On Carthage compared to Rome in classical historiography, positively: Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar,  f.  Clover and Humphreys, Tradition, .  Stroumsa, Sacrifice, .  Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome.  Clover and Humphreys, Tradition, , .

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Antiquity and Late Antiquity in space and time



This is a consideration which includes the emergence of the classical forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, still recognisable today, and a notion of duration that is determined primarily by cultural, conceptual and literary developments. As a theme in the history of religions, this suggestion has the merit of sectoral analysis to which specific chronological markers might be applied, and of the precise topical definition of a history marked successively, across Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by prophetic, scriptural and Patristic or classical moments. This is a period that saw the continuing canonisation of Greek classics that had started earlier in Alexandria, of the Septuagint, the New Testament, the Vulgate, the Talmud, the Avesta and the Qur’ān. If the religious history of the period were so considered, it would be most serviceable for the interpretation of religious aspects of Islam in terms of longer-term trends, with the Qur’ān emerging as the culmination of a process that had been solidifying over a number of centuries. Given temporal extension, this is of course no longer just Late Antiquity; but it does have sectoral merit and coherence.

Other sectoral periodisations have more conventionally late antique termini. Consideration of ethnic criteria would place the end of Late Antiquity at c. ; of linguistic and religious criteria at more or less the same time; of cultural criteria perhaps with Bede (d. ); of artistic criteria with the fourth and fifth centuries; of economic criteria up until the tenth century – with the rather unhelpful overall result that one might average out these termini to around , these considerations pertaining primarily to the Latin West. Others have set the period – as the one upon which research needs to concentrate, with vast differences separating the one terminus from the other, all conceived in terms of Roman history, and yet others seem implicitly to reinstate, without further consideration, the Pirenne thesis regarding the cultural and political unity of the Mediterranean sundered by Islam, signalling the end of Late Antiquity in negative and catastrophic terms. Yet all these possibilities of delimitation – apart from Fowden’s – seem to end more or less around , terminating ‘a pregnancy already well  Fowden, ‘Contextualizing’,  f., now argued at book-length in Before and after Muhammad.  Fowden, ‘Contextualizing’,  ff.  On which theme, see Smith, ‘Scripture’,  f.,  ff.  Smith, ‘Scripture’, .  Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’,  f.,  f., ,  ff., .  Swain, ‘Introduction’, passim.  Cambridge Ancient History, , ‘Preface’, xix.  For a sketch of other termini and criteria proposed, especially in Germanophone scholarship, see

Martin, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?’,  ff.

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Late Antiquity and Islam



advanced’ and bound to west European moorings. They share the virtue of blending well with conventional academic boundaries. The extension beyond , initially attractive to some, has been greeted with reserve and dismissed as ‘a recent fashion’; when including Islam, it has sometimes been the object of some derision. Brown’s construal of Hārūn al-Rashı̄d rather than Charlemagne as the true heir of the ancient world, and his later ‘œcumenical revision’, setting up the two contemporaries on a par with one another in this respect, might imply some change of heart, and possibly also a response to institutional academic resistance, and clearly a conservative reaction to the earlier enthusiasms of Late Antiquity scholarship. But to possible chronological termini should be added a crucial point of ‘capital importance’, that of the extension of geographical boundaries, beyond what has been described as western Antiquity. This would be correlative to the disengagement of Late Antiquity from a concept captive to the Italian location of Rome, and a consequent move to parts that had by then become more cosmopolitan than Rome ever was, and more central to the constitution of the empire, parts carrying the historical sense and burden of the era. In themselves, chronological termini, however decided, do not give sense to the series of developments and events that one might designate as late antique, medieval, or whatever. One would need to search for their coherence, and coherence is an aspect of structure, not of calendrical time through which it flows. Geography, historically considered, is implicit in this.

Of ‘capital importance’ in this respect is the need to factor in what has been characterised as the geographical equivalent of the chronological flight from the old centres. This would entail ab initio that one steer  Fowden, ‘Elefentiasi’, .  Giardina, ‘Esplosione’, .

 Cambridge Ancient History, , ‘Preface’, xviii f.  See Brown, ‘World’, .



Athanassiadi, ‘Antiquité tardive’, . Brown himself (‘World’, ) spoke of an ‘amende honorable’ to the West.  Fowden, ‘Contextualizing’, . Signs of conceptual fatigue and hallmarks of academic orthodoxy in contrast to the freshness of the s and s are highlighted by Athanassiadi, ‘Antiquité tardive’, .  Brown, ‘World’, , and, most elaborately, Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth,  ff.  As in the most interesting discussion of Hübinger, Spätantike,  f., who, while considering the Roman empire, as had Droysen before him, as a fulfilment rather than as a token of decline ( f.,  ff.), focuses his attention on Germanic Europe. This is of course unsurprising in a view which uses a spatial metaphor, considering the main intelligible historical categories to be cultural circles or culture areas (Kulturkreise) – ibid., .  Hübinger, Spätantike,  f. It should be noted that the word ‘burden’ was used here, and not ‘destiny’ or one of its equivalent terms.  Bowersock, ‘Riflessioni’, .

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away from the question of roots, legacies and heritages, and move on to historical dynamics. It is not origin as norm, a matter deeply inscribed onto a mind trained in the classics, and not geographical fastness, that would lend sense to a historical dynamic. It is rather the dynamic by which a structure moves along both time and space, and the resultant historical direction. This is not an inevitable dynamic, but not the product of chance either, and not a teleological history in reverse, inevitably leading, in this case, to the Middle Ages and on to modern Europe. Speaking of a historical dynamic leads the discussion to identify actors that articulate the elements of this period, and direct them, bearing in mind all the while that this positing of a direction is not taken to imply a fated process that is even, imperturbably composed, without variation and residues, like Braudel’s ‘glacial’ surface of civilisations. Chronological and other confusions, and indeed absurdities, may and do arise when a binding element is not identified in the definition of a historiographic category or a historical period. Without such an identification, one would have with Late Antiquity, as one does with ‘early modern history’, an indeterminacy that ‘confers an aura of innovation on an agenda that is by now as conventional as anything said about the Renaissance’. It is proposed here that the binding element and hinge in the case of Late Antiquity is neither Athens nor Rome, neither Constantinople nor Damascus, neither Charlemagne nor Hārūn al-Rashı̄d, nor is it classical Greek or Roman culture, however described, nor Christian Orthodoxy or the Holy Man. It is œcumenical empire, along with its urban institutes and its political theology, pagan, Christian and Muslim. In a perspective such as this, the fast distinctions of East and West lose determinant salience, and one would consequently be able to understand what might be implied by the famous complaint about the Orontes flowing into the Tiber in a way  Cf. the view of G. Rodenwald (‘Zur Begrenzung und Gliederung der Spätantike’, Jhrb. d. Deutschen

Archäologischen Institut, / (–), , quoted in Hübinger, Spätantike,  n. ), that the beginning of Late Antiquity is not the same thing as its roots. Cameron (‘Thoughts’,  ff.) gives an excellent treatment of Momigliano’s thoughts on Late Antiquity as the repository of Europe’s ‘triple heritage’ of Judaism, Christianity and classical culture.  Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, .  See the cautionary remarks on teleology by Wickham (Inheritance, ), who argues that Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages, and that, for someone in the year  looking forward to future industrialisation, the bet would have been on Egypt, not the Rhineland.  See Cameron, ‘A. H. M. Jones’, –, on various termini proposed for Late Antiquity, none argued convincingly.  Starn, ‘Early modern muddle’, , who adds ( f.) that this diminishes the liabilities of periodisation, using ‘complexity’ as a ‘covering trope’.

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commensurate with the complexity of history. The Roman empire was indeed imperial, but Rome was also manfully provincial. The geographical and chronographic incorporation of the empire into the universal historiography of the time was the work of provincials, Polybius, Castor of Rhodes and others, and later of Christian chronographers as well, working within the framework of a Roman empire making possible the cultural Hellenisation of the world. The nominative terms used to designate this period, as late Roman or late antique, and its history that of late Romanity or of Late Antiquity, are implicated, as implicit bearers of a constancy of direction, in the definition of the period. Such a consideration would need to give the notion of imperial translation a much stronger and consequent sense, one that late antique Byzantines, for one, were clearly aware of, self-interested as this awareness many have been. One would need to consider the Eurasian œcumene from the northern Mediterranean littoral to Iran, most particularly following the move of the effective rather than the notional capital to Constantinople, when this empire came to be dependent on maritime communications, as a coherent historical unit. This was a region that had for centuries been one of intense communication, limited by the technological possibilities of the age, and of contestation. Like other large-scale units such as the 

Juvenal, Satire .. This complaint was seemingly directed against the influence of Asia Minor and Greece, and the Orontes was used as a metonym for Hellenistic influences overall: Kaizer, ‘Oriental cults’,  n. . See also Belayche, ‘Deae syriae’,  f., who shows that Oriental religions in Rome were perceived not as Oriental per se, but rather as external superstitions.  Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar, ,  ff., ,  ff.,  ff.; Clarke, ‘Universal perspectives’,  and passim. For social and urban counterparts of this Hellenisation (including Cappadocia and Judaea), see, for instance, Jones, ‘Greeks’,  ff.; for the workings of the Roman imperial cult in Anatolia as a mechanism of incorporation and articulation based upon cities, see Price, Rituals,  and pt i, passim. With regard to Syria, note that there is evidence that Hellenism was not, as generally assumed, confined to cities. It has been suggested that this general assumption is modelled upon the image of Hellenophone bishops counterposed to Syriac monks (Bowersock, Hellenism,  f.).  On constancy of direction, cf. the comments of Gerschenkron, Continuity,  f., , but see the warning () that stringent conditions for the consideration of continuity are normally relaxed and become associatively impressionistic statements, ‘a hybrid mass . . . gladly welcomed to the field of the social sciences as a most palatable mixture of scientific cognition and social desirability’. See also Wilcox, Measure,  f., , on the distinction between episodic and linear time, the chronological order of the former having no causal consequence. This constancy of direction is of course reflected in late antique historical writing, and in ecclesiastical writings as well, excepting Tertullian and others who saw the res Graecorum, associated with Hellenism, to be foreign to Romanity (Fischer, Oriens–Occidens, , , ).  The Frankish claim to translatio imperii is of course much later, and fraudulent in having been introduced after a major chronological and structural gap. It would be interesting to note an indicator of the parochialism of Frankish political vocabulary of the time that translatio originally meant the transfer of a bishopric: Irmscher, ‘Neurom’, .  Mitchell, Later Roman Empire, , .

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Antiquity and Late Antiquity in space and time



Mediterranean, this region might be considered as a continuum of discontinuities, a space of contiguous but not necessarily connected regions, a micro-ecological constellation of micro-ecologies; regions which, when connected, were so by virtue of overarching, higher, unnatural instances, such as states imperial and otherwise, cultures, and cults, resulting in a situation best described as ‘dense fragmentation complemented by striving towards political control of communications’. In this, the role of empires was crucial.

The extreme fragmentation of this Eurasian area notwithstanding, one would need to take stock of levels at which analysis could usefully be pitched to consider elements of unity, and to account for the continuous wars that pitted the various large-scale political units against each other almost continually. The Polybian model of œcumenical imperial succession, and the distinction it makes between accomplished empires with œcumenical vocations and others with more restricted regional and other vocations, and its later redaction of empires in terms of Christian salvation history, would not be much off the mark as an heuristic guide, provided that one were to remove the teleological and monistic ideas inherent in it and consider it as the impress of an imperial experience in a world of empires of which imperial subjects were aware. These subjects, or at least those who mattered to the empire, signalled this awareness by composing, in an œcumenical spirit, histories, world chronographies, and world geographies and ethnographies as well. They also signalled it philosophically by a cosmopolitanism that goes under the vague title of Stoicism, most of whose representatives seem to have been provincials, indeed Orientals. Some state systems signalled this by instituting universal calendars; the Seleucid era, first introduced by Antiochus I in  bc and named after his father, persisted as a dating system in general – but not exclusive – use for nearly a millennium. The extension of universal history in a 

Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, , ,  and ch. , passim.

See the discussion of Baldry, Unity of Mankind,  ff. As a work of geography and ethnology, Pliny’s Natural History displays ‘a planetary consciousness’, and is an encyclopaedia written in a triumphalist mode premised on the centrality of Rome: Murphy, Pliny the Elder,  ff.,  ff., and ch. , passim (quotation at ).  Baldry, Unity of Mankind,  f., .  The Julian calendar, rational and easy of use as it is, based on Greek and Egyptian science and geared towards purposes of central control, remained for long practically confined to Roman (rather than imperial) needs and uses, used in the provinces along with synchronisation with dating by consuls and regnal calendars: Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar,  f.,  ff., and passim. This is an incongruity that I cannot understand; interpretation in terms of haughty Roman provincialism does not seem to outweigh its practical and symbolic generalisation, nor does it appear that the administrative mechanisms and areas of utility for its empire-wide use were lacking. Feeney (Caesar’s Calendar, 

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

Late Antiquity and Islam

unified compass by Pompeius Trogus took the notion of translatio imperii beyond Polybius’ integration of the eastern Mediterranean with Rome and Carthage, beginning with the th Olympiad, less than a century before Polybius, and well into western Asia and to the time of Ninus, thus transcending any particular Roman conquests and working with the very idea of conquest itself.

Antistrophe and translation: Rome, New Rome, imperial translation It has been suggested that setting up the period of c. – as the age of Late Antiquity makes sense ‘only from the standpoint of Roman destiny’. It has also been suggested, and this is much in conformity with disciplinary boundaries that Late Antiquity scholarship sought to challenge initially, that it is on the West ‘that we need to focus’ in studying this period, the East having survived Barbarian onslaughts for no obvious reason ‘beyond good luck and good management’. Not unnaturally, it has been suggested in parallel manner that limiting consideration of Late Antiquity to the eastern Mediterranean region compromises the viability of this historiographic category, the assumption here being driven, in all likelihood, by concern for chronology.

The means of good fortune here would include, concretely and among other things, the fortifications of Constantinople and its geographical location, the secure tax base from Constantinople to the Nile, and a variety of military alliances, including one with Arabs who, under Queen Māwı̄ya, helped save Constantinople from the Gothic assault of . These factors surely betoken a greater historical coherence, greater administrative capacities, a more cohesive polity, and a more continuous and resilient system of alliances, and of course greater economic capacity, matters that would vitiate the view that the East was not ‘innately and structurally more

) finds this striking, and compares this situation to China, where incorporation within an empire was signalled by ‘receiving’ the imperial calendar.  Wilcox, Measure,  f.  Clover and Humphreys, Tradition, . On the other hand, the observation has been made that the West has been relatively neglected in Late Antiquity studies, but that casting doubt upon the notion of decline makes little sense in the former western empire: James, ‘Rise’,  f., .  Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, .  Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome, , .  Cameron, ‘Late Antiquity’,  f.  Sozomenos, Historia, ..; Ward-Perkins, Fall of Rome,  ff.; Sartre, Etudes, .

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