Exploring the Qur’an and the Bible with Gabriel Said Reynolds: “Juan Cole: Infidel or Pagan? Understanding Kufr (كفر) in the Qur’an | Muhammad the Prophet of Peace ”

Juan Cole, here. This is what I wrote on the subject at IC when my article first appeared:

My new article is out in The Journal of the American Oriental Society about the meaning of the root k-f-r in the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture. We’ve all grown up hearing about the Qur’an’s condemnation of “infidels” or “unbelievers,” but I think that this is for the most part a mistranslation. I argue that the root does not mean “infidel” but “pagan” or “polytheist” (and I think with the connotation of hostile, impious and morally corrupt pagan). In fact, I think the Arabic may be a translation of the Latin paganus. The latter had connotations of “hick” or “rustic” but also of “polytheist” and the same is true in Qur’anic Arabic.

Juan Cole, “Infidel or Paganus? The Polysemy of kafara in the Quran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 140, 3:(2020): 615-635:

I also find that the noun kāfir is never applied in the Qur’an to Jews and Christians in an unmodified way. The noun implies “pagan” or “scoundrel” or “ingrate.”

The Qur’an considers Jews and Christians to be monotheists or submitters to the one God (muslimun). This is the antonym of “pagan.” In The Cow 2:62, the Qur’an promises paradise to righteous Jews, Christians and other monotheists alongside the followers of Muhammad.

I write in the article, “A key attribute of the [pagan] kāfir, as we have seen, is that such a person is damned to hell. Dominion 67:6 reads: “And for those who denied (kafarū bi-) their Lord, there awaits the torment of hell, and a wretched destination!” In contrast, in speaking of Jews and Christians we find in The Spider 29: “Debate the scriptural communities only in the best of ways, except for those who do wrong. Say ‘We believe in the revelation sent down to us, and the revelation sent down to you; our God and your God is one, and to him we have submitted’.””

It is common in the contemporary Muslim world to refer to all non-Muslims as kuffār or unbelievers, but I believe this is contrary to the usage of the Qur’an itself.

I think virtually all Qur’an translations err in consistently translating kafir as “infidel” or “unbeliever” or “disbeliever,” since this rendering implies a larger group than just pagans.

I made some of these arguments very briefly in my book on the Prophet Muhammad, but since it is a rip-roaring historical narrative I could not stop and do word philosophy at length:

In the article, I also explore how the verb kafara can be used of anybody. It means to commit impiety, blasphemy, immorality, etc. It is like the verb “to sin.” Monotheists can commit impiety as a one-off or occasional act, but that does not cause them to be characterized as among the group of pagans or kafirun. Even Muhammad’s own followers can commit this sin, as I explain:

“The verb kafara, however, is more fluid and is sometime applied to monotheists. The Family of Imran 3:167 complains about those of Muḥammad’s believers who declined to go out to defend the city (later commentators say the verse concerned the battle of Uḥud in 625): “They were told, ‘Come, fight in the path of God, or at least take a defensive position’. They replied, ‘If we knew how to fight, we would have followed you’. That day, they were closer to kufr than to faith, inasmuch as they said with their lips what was not in their hearts. God knows best what they are concealing.” The deverbal noun kufr here clearly means hypocrisy or dishonesty rather than disbelief.

Here are a few excerpts from the article, which I have modified slightly in an attempt to make them a bit more readable. The original is technical and written for specialists, but I think the findings are accessible and very important. Obviously, scholars should consult the full text for footnotes and for the larger argument about how the noun and verb could diverge from one another (and there really are two distinct verbs, only one of which means “to disbelieve” in a straightforward and consistent way).

—–
From Juan Cole, “Infidel or Paganus? The Polysemy of kafara in the Quran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 140, 3:(2020): 615-635:

The active participle kāfir . . . cannot be assumed necessarily to mean “rejecter of something” or “infidel.” Rather, it has a wide range of meanings that can be discerned contextually. In Iron 57:20 the broken plural refers to rustic farmers: “Know that the life of this nether world is a game, a sport, a trinket, a mutual boast among yourselves and a multiplication of your wealth and children. It resembles rain whose resultant vegetation pleases the peasants (kuffār), but then it withers and you see it yellowing into chaff.” As al-Khalīl mentioned [in his early dictionary], kafr means village, reinforcing the rural connotation of the root. It may be that a secondary meaning of polytheist or adherent of traditional religion emerged because the population in the countryside was more likely than its urban counterpart to have clung to the old gods and resisted accepting monotheism.

The root is also clearly associated in the Quran with polytheism. Al-Kāfirūn 109:1–6 opens with: “Say: kāfirūna! I do not worship what you worship. Nor are you worshipping what I worship. Nor am I worshipping what you have worshipped. Nor are you worshipping what I worship. To you your religion and to me my religion.” There is an admission that the pagans have a religion, but it is simply castigated as a false one, which makes translating kāfir as “infidel” seem odd. That the dispute was over Muḥammad’s monotheism versus Arabian polytheism is demonstrated by Ṣād 38:4–5, which says . . . “They marvel that a warner came to them from among them, and the [pagans] kāfirūna said, ‘This is a lying sorcerer. Has he made the gods into only one God? That is an astonishing thing’.” This and many other verses demonstrate that the Quran came out at least in part of a milieu where there were adherents of traditional religion . . .

The sense of “to worship the gods” for k-f-r is underlined in The Cow 2:257: “God is the patron of those who believe, bringing them out of darkness into the light. And those who kafarū, their patrons are Ṭāghūt, who bring them out of the light into darkness.” Ṭāghūt is a loan from [Ethiopian] Geʿez that means “new or alien god” or “idol,” and, interestingly, is treated as a plural in this quranic verse, corresponding to numerous patrons. Belief in polytheistic religion is not, properly speaking, disbelief but the wrong sort of belief, from the point of view of the Quran. It is not a charge of atheism. Not only are such believers committed polytheists but they are also militant: “Those who believed fight in the path of God, and the pagans (al-ladhīna kafarū) fight in the path of Ṭāghūt, so fight the associates of Satan, for the guile of Satan is feeble” (al-Nisāʾ 4:76) . . .

Elsewhere, it is admitted that they [the pagans] are believers in their own tradition; when they question the eschatological opening or grand success, the verse reads: “Say: On the Day of the Opening, the faith (īmānuhum) of those who kafarū will not benefit them, nor will they be granted a respite” (al-Sajda 32:29). Since it is allowed that they have faith, they are not unbelievers strictly speaking and translating this phrase as “the faith of the infidels will not benefit them” would be self-contradictory. While they are not accused of disbelieving, they are, however, liars and wrongdoers, dishonest and workers of evil (cf. The Women 4:167–68). As well as labeling them “wrongdoers” (sing. ẓālim), they are “morally dissolute” (fāsiqūna) for responding incorrectly to God’s proverbs (The Cow 2:26). Along the same lines, it is said of Muḥammad’s monotheistic followers: “God has caused you to love faith, rendering it beautiful in your hearts, and he has caused you to abhor impiety (kufr) and ungodly behavior (fusūq) and rebellion” (al-Ḥujurāt 49:7).

“Rebel” is one meaning of the root k-f-r. In the story of how Lucifer fell (The Cow 2:34) it is reported: “And when we said to the angels, ‘Bow down to Adam’, they prostrated them- selves, save the Devil; he refused, and grew haughty, and so he became one of the rebellious (kāfirīna).” The active participle here does not involve disbelief but disobedience. The Devil (Iblīs, Gk diabolos) is not accused of rejecting the existence or oneness of God but of refusing the divine order to bow down to the first human being. Indeed, in 2:30 the angels are depicted as arguing with God that creating Adam would lead to turmoil, and the implication is that Satan parted ways with God not because he disbelieved but because he had a positive if misguided motive -— he differed with him on the wisdom of opening Pandora’s box . . .

kufr is equated with impiety, which Grecophone Christians in their polemics against the pagans called asebeia. Likewise, in Prohibition 66:10 God had made the wives of Noah and Lot an object lesson for those who kafarū because of these women’s preference for pagan society over their husbands. The reason given in 2 Pet 2:6 for the calamity that befell the people of Sodom and Gomorrah is that they lived impious lives (asebesin), which seems roughly the meaning of kufr in Q 66:10.

BLASPHEMY

A controversial passage in The Cow 2:102 provides a further sense of the verb. The Quran condemns those in the era of Solomon who followed demons… that taught magic. It goes out of its way to underline that Solomon himself did not commit kufr, even though in late antique folk tradition he was held to be able to control sprites and demons. The demons were guilty of putting otherwise inoffensive teachings to evil purposes, turning them into black magic, so that they kafarū (A. J. Arberry translates this as “disbelieved”). Of what, however, did this act consist? It does not appear to have been a denial of anything, but rather was a blasphemous activity. The humans were eager to have the teaching of the two angels of Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt, which they then desecrated by turning it into dark arts so as to separate spouses from one another. The demons’ instruction harmed people rather than benefited them, and turning to the occult deprived these individuals of any portion of heaven.

Hārūt and Mārūt are two of the Zoroastrian celestial spirits, Haurvatāt and Ameretāt. These emanations of the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, symbolize wholeness and immortality. For instance, in the Younger Avesta, Yasht 19.95–96, the last days during which the world will be renovated are described thus: “Evil thought will be overcome, good thought will overcome it . . . The celestial spirits Integrity (Haurvatāt) and Immortality (Ameretāt) will defeat the demons of Hunger (Shud) and Thirst (Tarshna).” The two celestial spirits associated with nemeses among the demons symbolizing bodily human cravings like hunger and thirst may have inspired the Quran’s motif that devils misused their teachings to satisfy lust. Moreover, Ameretāt is associated with plants, fertility, and the tree of life. The Quran could be projecting into the time of Solomon a contemporary set of Zoroastrian ideas. The retrofitting of this motif to the time of the Hebrew monarch may in turn have come about because of the association in late antiquity of Solomon with mastery of the sprites or demons, which is reflected in quranic passages.

In late antique Greek Christian authors, black magic was associated with blasphemy (which originally meant slandering [God]). In his “Homily 10 on 2 Timothy,” John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407 CE) wrote, “Let us then so live that the name of God be not blasphemed (blasphēmíesthai).” Among the many examples he gave of Christians blaspheming in failing to live up to their ideals were “your auguries, your omens, your superstitious observances . . . your incantations, your magic (mageías) arts.”

What if we translated The Cow 2:101 this way?

“They followed what the demons recited over the realm of Solomon. Solomon himself was not a blasphemer, but the demons were blasphemers, teaching the people magic and what was revealed to the two archangels of Babylon, Haurvatāt and Ameretāt. But these two had been careful not to teach anyone without warning them, ‘We are a potential disturbance of faith (fitna), so do not fall into blasphemy.’ From them they learned how they might divide a man and his wife [. . .].”

Here is a condemnation of warlocks and witches who engage in what is seen as necromancy, which apparently enables those who covet married persons to cast spells to separate them from their spouses. They are instructed by demons who pervert and misuse the teachings of divinely inspired Zoroastrian angels.
Later Muslim commentators on this text are divided over its meaning. Some saw the anecdote as concerning fallen angels. Others defended the angels as having been sinless, and held that while they performed licit miracles, the demons turned their teachings to the purposes of thaumaturgy. As I read the text, the teaching of the angels itself is not being condemned here. Solomon, the verse says, bore no blame for his mastery of the spirits. The Zoroastrian celestial spirits are spoken of with reverence, called angels rather than demons, and are depicted as having been given inspiration (unzila) by God. The angels act responsibly inasmuch as they give disciples an explicit warning that learning their esoteric teachings could tempt humans, if they are not careful, to the dark side. (Zoroastrianism is listed in Pilgrimage 22:17 with the monotheistic religions and distinguished from paganism.)

The Quran shows positive attitudes throughout to Christians and The Cow 2:62 admits Christians to heaven (“Those who believed, and the Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, and whoever has believed in God and the Last Day and performed good works, they shall have their reward with their Lord”). To underline the difference, the Quran shows God pledging to Jesus regarding future Christians in The Family of Imran 3:55: “God said, ‘Jesus, I will take you to me and will raise you to me and I will purify you of those who kafarū and will render those who follow you superior to those who kafarū until the judgment day’.” Likely it is distinguishing between the old pagan Romans, who had persecuted Jesus and his faithful, and the Christians themselves. There will always be, the Quran vows, a difference between followers of Jesus and the kāfirūn. This and other passages suggest to me that the deverbal noun kāfir is never used tout court for Jews and Christians.

[Takeaway: kafir as a noun is never used in the Qur’an to refer to Christians and Jews, only to pagans or rebels or blasphemers or the morally dissolute.]

In the Medinan period, the Quran uses the verb kafara when it begins speaking of an antagonistic group from among the other monotheists: “Neither those who kafarū from among the people of the Book, nor the polytheists (mushrikūna) themselves, desire that good from your lord descend upon you” (The Cow 2:105). Some groups from among the biblical communities had allied politically with the militant pagans. A hypernym — for instance, “tree”—is lexically superordinate to hyponyms, another set of nouns or phrases under its rubric (e.g., “juniper” and “acacia”). Here the phrase “people of the Book” functions as a phrasal hypernym, which is lexically superordinate to the hyponym “Those who kafarū from among the people of the Book.” Logically speaking, the need to identify this subset of believers in the Bible as those who kafarū proves that kāfir does not ordinarily refer to Jews and Christians. That is, if all Jews and Christians were always kāfirūn, it would be redundant to identify this group “from among the people of the Book” as “those who kafarū.” Moreover, if all Jews and Christians were always kāfirūn, it would make nonsense of God’s pledge to Jesus (Āl ʿImrām 3:55) that he “will render those who follow you superior to those who kafarū until the judgment day.” Christians are not kāfirūn under ordinary circumstances, just as they are not doomed to hell under ordinary circumstances. Still, just as they can commit mortal sins and so depart from righteousness into perdition, so they can throw in with bellicose polytheists against Muḥammad and his cause, and likewise join the damned . . .

PAGANUS

It is suggestive that kāfir maps so closely onto the Latin paganus as it was used in late antiquity. Remus points to an imperial decree of 416 CE (16.10.21) that excludes from government service “those who are polluted by the profane error or crime of pagan rites, that is, gentiles (qui profano pagani ritus errore seu crimine polluntur, hoc est gentiles).” This principle was reaffirmed by Justinian (r. 527–565) in his Code (1.5.19), which body of law applied to Arabic speakers in the empire in Muḥammad’s own era. The Table 5:103 likewise denounces the pagan rites of sacrifice to idols practiced by those who kafarū and al-Jumʿa 62:2 speaks of “purifying” gentiles (ummiyūna) implying that paganism had polluted them.

The two words share a number of other meanings and connotations -— rural, polytheist, opponent, persecutor, enemy, blasphemer, potential convert, and interlocutor. K-f-r may at least in some instances be a loanshift from the Latin paganus. Whatever the etymology of the term paganus, by the late fourth century it had come to mean both “rustic” and “adherent of the old Roman religion.” It was often used satirically, to class the remaining pagan aristocracy with unlettered peasants.

Centuries of Roman rule had made Arabic speakers familiar with Latin vocabulary. The word for “path” in the phrase “straight path” of piety in the Quran, ṣirāṭ, is a loan from the Latin via strata or paved avenue.72 One route for Latin influence was the Arab mounted foederati who served as an auxiliary to the Roman army in Bostra and elsewhere, since Latin remained the language of the military. Another way Latin may have proved influential was through law, inasmuch as fourth- and fifth-century imperial decrees and even some of the sixth-century Code of Justinian were still issued in Latin as well as Greek in the sixth century.

I have argued that kāfir in the Quran for the most part does not mean “unbeliever” or “infidel.” In most of our examples, a lack of belief is not at stake. Rather, kāfir is a polysemous term that has a wide range of meanings, including “peasant,” “pagan,” “libertine,” “rebel,” and “blasphemer.” These are discernible if we look at the parallelisms, synonyms, and antonyms with which quranic verses surround this noun. I understand the impulse of translators to use “unbeliever” for kāfir, and, of course, the term sometimes does mean just that. Moreover, the condemnations of pagan belief and practice, while often made with other terms, could be seen to imply unbelief at some meta level. I argue, however, that limiting the meaning of the root so severely causes us to miss a rich set of other connotations that give us a rounder idea of the Quran’s intent…

I have suggested that the bilingual lives of many Arabic speakers in and on the fringes of the Roman empire over hundreds of years (Arabic-Aramaic and Arabic-Greek) contributed to this polysemy, through the phenomenon of the loanshift. The Latin paganus, which came to have the connotation both of “rustic” and “polytheist” in the fifth and sixth centuries, may well lie behind Iran 57:20, which refers to kuffār as peasants happy to see rain and greenery. At the same time, the quranic term is clearly also used to refer to polytheists. Ṣād 38:5 reports of the kāfirūn that they rejected the notion that the many gods could merge into only one, while The Cow 2:257 says that those who kafarū had taken the deity or idol Ṭāghūt for their patron instead of God. The Family of Imran 3:151 menaces these pagans with hellfire for having made God part of a pantheon (ashrakū). While it is not impossible that Arabic independently invented a connection between farmers and polytheists, Occam’s razor would suggest that we instead posit that Arabic was influenced by late antique Roman Christian usage, which was embedded in imperial laws applying to Arabophone citizens of the empire. In any case, far from being deniers or nihilists, the pagans are admitted to believe in their own religion (dīn) and to have faith (īmānuhum) in it. It is simply a false religion. Kafara thus has a positive valence that “to disbelieve” does not capture, even if the latter is not ultimately an incorrect characterization of the quranic view of the pagans.

I discuss the rise of Islam in my book,

A team led by the University of Basel’s Dominick Fleitmann, a professor of environmental sciences, investigated a stalagmite from the Hoota cave in Oman. Stalagmites are rock formations that rise from the floor of a cave as precipitation, carrying calcium residues, lava, sand and other materials drips down from the ceiling. Fleitman and his colleagues were able to establish rates of precipitation in the cave through the past 1500 years, and showed that there was almost no growth of the stalagmite for several decades in the 500s.

What we now call the Middle East was both familiar and alien in the 500s. The Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, held what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, and Egypt, administering these provinces in Greek and usually favoring Chalcedonian Christianity, though some emperors had other tastes.

The Sasanian Empire ruled Iran, what is now Pakistan, some of Central Asia, and Iraq.

In 500 CE (A.D.) what is now Yemen was ruled by the Himyarite dynasty, as it had been for several centuries. The Himyarites were caught between the Eastern Romans and the Sasanian Iranians, just as today’s Yemen is an arena of conflict between the US and its allies on the one side and Iran on the other.

Across the Red Sea from Yemen, in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom of Aksum dominated. It adopted the Miaphysite theology in opposition to the Chalcedonian and used the Ge’ez language, old Ethiopic. The kingdom had Greek as the language of some administrative decrees and its theologians studied Greek in Alexandria.

The Himyarite dynasty appears to have turned against the old gods around 380, ceasing to patronize their temples, which fell into desuetude. The kings of Himyar instead begain making inscriptions to the All-Merciful, Rahmanan. Sometimes their inscriptions seem explicitly Jewish, but other instances they seem to be monolatrists, worshiping the Merciful God; one inscription suggests that these Rahmanists sometimes recognized other deities, such as the Jewish Yahweh. In the early 500s, an explicitly Jewish king, Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar, known as Dhu Nuwas, came to power and persecuted Christians in his environments. He may also have tilted to Iran geopolitically, since the Sasanians were Zoroastrians often at war with the Christian Eastern Roman Empire.

Around 520, the king of Aksum, Kaleb, launched an invasion of Himyar.Procopius says that Constantinople put him up to it to ensure that Iran’s proxy could not interfere with Roman trade down the Red Sea and through the Bab al-Mandeb that leads to the Indian Ocean and the trading entrepot of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

Dhu Nuwas responded by massacring Christians at Najran in 523, creating storied martyrs whose stories provoked grief in Christendom. Ultimately the Aksumite armies defeated him and killed him. For a while, Kaleb’s general,
Sumūyafa Ashwa, became the viceroy of what is now Yemen. Around 531, he was deposed by an Aksumite general, Abraha, who made himself an independent king of Yemen. He persecuted Jews and promoted Christianity, probably dying around 668. He was briefly succeeded in turn by two sons, who fell out with one another, and one of them allied with the Sasanians. Around 570 an Iranian naval expedition conquered Yemen and Iran ruled the area until descendants (abna’) of the Iranian admirals and other officers garrisoned there embraced Islam in the late 620s, according to the later historian Tabari.

The great Classicist, G. W. Bowersock told this story in one of my favorite books, The Throne of Adulis.

So Professor Fleitmann’s stalagmite may help explain the end of the Himyarite kingdom and the rule instead of Aksumite generals for much of the 500s.

That is, Aksum had long been interested in dominating what is now Yemen, but that was a tall order. The country is rugged and Himyar had flourished, with dams and irrigation works. The Romans called it Arabia Felix, Happy Arabia, with the implication of “prosperous.” Wanting to dominate it and being able to were not the same thing.

But if in the 520s Himyar was in the grip of a prolonged drought, the irrigation canals would have dried up and the crops would have withered and the farming villages that may have provided Himyar with its troops would have been starving and weak. Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar was likely defeated so handily by the armies dispatched by Kaleb of Aksum because his sources of wealth and power had dried up in the drought.

The establishment of Christianity as the state religion in Yemen was in turn fateful for the religious history of the Tihama, the literal of the Red Sea from Yemen up through the Hijaz to the southern Transjordan. Even as the Transjordan was Christianizing and abandoning the old gods, Yemen was Christianizing, disprivileging the old Jewish court elite.

The successive conquests would have created refugees and slaves in Mecca and Medina, the cities of the Prophet Muhammad, first Jews in Medina fleeing Kaleb’s and Abraha’s persecution, then Christians from 570 fleeing Zoroastrian rule. Some of the audience of the Qur’an were said to be the lower class and slaves in Mecca, and were likely significantly Christian.

Professor Fleitmann and his colleagues have resolved a further piece of the puzzle of pre-Islamic Yemen, adding an important archeological finding to the work on inscriptions of Christian Robin and Iwona Gajda.

The earlier date is only 16 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and falls in the reign of the third Commander of the Faithful, `Uthman b. `Affan.

The later range of possible dates stretch into the Umayyad kingdom (traditionally dated 661-750), when the early Muslim empire was ruled from Damascus.

David reports that the archeologists view their discoveries as upending myths about this era. They find evidence that the small 8-man crew was made up of a mixture of Christians and Muslims, who clearly worked closely with one another.

He writes,

“Clues to their identity have been left in the dozens of inscriptions painted or carved both on the amphorae of the cargo and the timbers of the ship itself. These writings include Greek and Arabic letters, as well as Christian crosses and Muslim invocations, such as bismillah – “in the name of God.”

The archeologists believe that the Arabic invocations to God and the Christian crosses and Greek phrases were carved by the crew in hopes of protecting the ship.

David quotes Deborah Cvikel, a professor of nautical archaeology at the University of Haifa, the leader of the excavation, as saying of these mixed religious symbols,

“One of the biggest takeaways from this shipwreck is that, in the past as in the present, normal people are more connected and united in working together than the history books would have you believe, based on geopolitical narratives of wars and battles . . .These are just regular people trying to make a living, selling things that they bought along the way.”

So I would go further. The find is support for the Donner thesis that early Islam was ecumenical. University of Chicago Professor Fred Donner argued in his 2010 Muhammad and the Believers that in the time of the Prophet and for some decades afterward, the community of Muhammad was made up not only of believers in the Qur’an but also of Christians and Jews who accepted the Prophet’s political and ethical leadership while keeping their own religious beliefs.

I accepted the Donner thesis in my own 2018 book:

There is a lot of textual evidence for the Donner thesis in the Islamic scripture, the Qur’an, and in documents we think are early, such as the Constitution of Medina and some reports about the four Commanders of the Faithful, later termed caliphs, who ruled after Muhammad’s death and about the first decades of the Umayyad kingdom.

Finnish scholar of early Islam, Ilkke Lindstedt found that the rock inscriptions from the first Muslim century also give some support to the notion of an ecumenical identity early on that only hardened later.

Israeli archeologists from Hebrew University working in Tiberias also found evidence of ecumenical Muslim rule in the 600s, such that the Christian cathedral continued to be the largest religious edifice in the city until the mid-800s.

There are also Syriac witnesses to this ecumenism from writers such as Yohannan (John) bar Penkaye, a monk in what is now northern Iraq writing in the late 600s.

He complained that Christians in the era of Mu’awiya, the first Umayyad king, were affected by the tolerance of the state in ways of which he disapproved, blasting his coreligionists for “trade with unbelievers, union with the perverse, relationships with heretics, friendship with the Jews.”

Bar Penkaye explained of Muslim rule,

“A man among them named Mu`awiya, took the reins of government of the two empires: Persian and Roman. Justice flourished under his reign, and a great peace was established in the countries that were under his government, and allowed everyone to live as they wished. They had received, as I said, from the man who was their guide, an order in favor of the Christians and the monks.”

He was referring to passages in the Qur’an that praised Christians and their holy men.

He said of freedom of conscience under the early Umayyads,

“From every man they required only the tribute, and left him free to hold any belief, and there were even some Christians among them: some belonged to the heretics and others to us. While Mu`awiya reigned there was such a great peace in the world as was never heard of, according to our fathers and our fathers’ fathers.”

That is, the Muslim rulers in the second half of the seventh century did not care what religious beliefs people held as long as they were loyal subjects and paid their taxes. The Muslims were a small minority, even if they were the ruling stratum, and so in their Western regions they needed Christian bureaucrats and even soldiers. Bar Penkaye a follower of the Church of the East, some members of which in that period had a somewhat Nestorian tendency. He said that some of his fellow members were with the Umayyads, presumably serving in the government, while Chalcedonian Christians worked with the Muslims, as well.

Bar Penkaye’s description is supported by an inscription published by Younis al-Shdaifat, Ahmad Al-Jallad, Zeyad al-Salameen, and Rafe Harahsheh. It says, “May God be mindful of Yazīd-w the king.” The inscription spells “God” in Arabic as al-Ilah, ‘the God’ which is how the Christians of greater Syria seem to have written it in that era, whereas the Muslims wrote Allah, with the two ‘l’s elided together. The inscription has a cross near the words. So the authors conclude that it was likely written by a Christian soldier in the service of Yazid I, the second Umayyad king (r. 680-683). And, this Christian soldier was loyal to the Muslim king.

So the finding that Christians and Muslims worked alongside each other and carved religious graffiti from their own religion into their ship should not be surprising.

David also quotes the archeologists as being impressed with the variety and origin of the goods being transported, apparently between Egypt, the Levant and Cyprus, though they find it possible that the ship also traded to Malta, a Christian-ruled island. The old notion of a seventh-century Dark Ages once Islam took over the southern half of the old Roman Empire, which had been put forward by the Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne, has long since been refuted. This shipwreck further disproves Pirenne’s thesis, which never had any proof to back it up.

A wide-ranging and in-depth discussion with Prof. Juan Cole on his recent book “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires”. The discussion begins with remarks about the question of the sources for such a history, it then situates the life of the prophet in the context of late antiquity and the contemporaneous ‘world war’ between Rome and Persia. Quranic allusions to these geopolitics are highlighted, followed by an illuminating discussion on the original meaning of Islam and Kufr in this early period and the ecumenism of the Prophet in accomodating and embracing the religious diversity of the time. The original theological and social ecumenism of the Quran is in obvious contrast to the later narrative of exclusivism which is a backprojection of triumphalist Abbasid chroniclers.

Alongside many more intriguing and eye-opening details of the prophetic biography, Prof. Cole also addresses some audience questions: such as those on Banu Qurayza, POWs and Slavery, and the relevance for the prophetic biography for peace studies.

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. He is the author of “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires”, as well as many other books including ‘The New Arabs’, ‘Engaging the Muslim World’, and ‘Napoleon’s Egypt’

He is the editor and creator of the award-winning Informed Comment news and commentary website – which average 4.5 million page views a year.

He has made various television, radio and press appearances. He has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. Prof. Cole commands Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and reads Turkish
He has translated works of the Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran
And most recently, published a new translation of the persian famous Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam.

Purchase

Ta’seel Commons: Interview with Juan Cole on “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires”

—-

Ta’seel Commons (Ta’seel: “contextualization, to “give an asl [root] to”) is an online space for disseminating information on contemporary ‘Islams’ and their place in the world.

For nearly two decades digitality has been revolutionizing all sectors, not least knowledge production and knowledge consumption. Many people are predicting the radical reconfiguration of the brick and mortar university as a result of online learning. Utilizing digital tools, Ta’seel Commons provides high quality content occupying the important space between the (purely) academic and the (purely) journalistic.

Ta’seel Commons covers a broad spectrum of topics from Theology to Philosophy, from Sociology to Anthropology, from History to Politics, from Sharia to Ethics. We tackles issue that are current and ongoing, historic and philosophical, sociological and metaphysical, grounded in an approach attuned to western critical sensibilities and the broader principles of the Islamic tradition.

Katia Cytryn-Silverman, an Israeli archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has concluded that the remains of a mosque in Tiberias, on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, is seventh century and may go back to 635 when it was founded by an early Muslim companion of the Prophet who helped lead the conquest of Palestine, Shurahbil ibn Hasana.

In any case, it goes back to at least 670, she says, according to Ilan Ben Zion of the Associated Press.

h/t Wikipedia.

This is the thing to underline: Tiberias was not damaged by the Arab Muslim conquest. A huge Christian church remained the biggest building for decades, dwarfing the humble mosque. Ben Zion quotes her as saying, “At least until the monumental mosque was erected in the 8th century, the church continued being the main building in Tiberias.”

He writes, “She says this supports the idea that the early Muslim rulers — who governed an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population — adopted a tolerant approach toward other faiths, allowing a “golden age” of coexistence.”

According to the AP article, Professor Cytryn-Silverman said,

“You see that the beginning of the Islamic rule here respected very much the population that was the main population of the city: Christians, Jews, Samaritans . . . They were not in a hurry to make their presence expressed into buildings. They were not destroying others’ houses of prayers, but they were actually fitting themselves into the societies that they now were the leaders of.”

By the way, there is also no evidence for Muslim Arab forces wreaking destruction on Damascus, Homs, or other cities. Some think they were hard on Caesarea Maritima over on the Mediterranean coast. But it turns out there was an enormous tsunami there in 551, and it likely was already a shadow of its former self in the 630s.

The ecumenical Muslim treatment of largely Christian Tiberias, which also had a significant Jewish community and synagogues, contrasts with their predecessors, the Zoroastrian Iranian troops of the Sasanian Empire, who took the region in the 610s.

Because of road building in northern Israel, Haaretz reported last summer, archeologists discovered the ruins of Pi Metzuba, a Christian town of the Eastern Roman Empire. One large villa owned by a notable family had a fine mosaic, in which Greek letters are visible as well as a depiction of Tyche, the goddess of fortune, whose iconography Christians adopted as a symbol of urban pride. Coins found on the floor show it was built around 600.

Credit: Howard Smithline on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

In 610-614 the armies of the Iranian monarch Khosrow II of the Sasanian Empire, invaded Syria and the provinces of Palestine, taking them away from eastern Roman emperor Heraclius. It was the first time the Romans lost the Levant since they had taken it

The archeologists discovered that Pi Metzuba was destroyed by the Iranian army around 613. And it wasn’t the only small town to be razed.

Gilad Cinamon, the Israeli Antiquities Authority archaeologist who directed the dig, said that out of 140 eastern Roman settlements in the Galilee, the Iranian invaders destroyed 60 of them.

So here is the thing. Archeologists can tell when they dig down to the Iranian conquest. There is a lot of destruction and violence. It wasn’t as bad as Christian chroniclers and monks alleged. But it was bad.

Christian accounts of the Iranian conquest are full of dire statistics. 70,000 people, they said, were killed in Jerusalem. The city was burned to the ground, churches destroyed. Thousands of artisans were deported to Iran to work for the Shah. But given the size of cities in the 600s AD, it is a little unlikely there were more than 70,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem. Israeli archeologists dug down to that level and found that while there was some damage and some loss of life, it was a fraction of what the Christian accounts alleged.

It was around 613 that later sources allege Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, hundreds of miles south. (Think, Santa Fe on the Santa Fe trail up to Missouri, with Missouri as Palestine). The scripture Muhammad brought, the Qur’an, shows distress at the defeat of the eastern Romans by Iran in 613-614: ”

“Rome lies vanquished in the nearest province. But in the wake of their defeat, they will triumph after a few years. Before and after, it is God who is in command. On that day, the believers will rejoice in the victory of God; he causes to triumph whomever he will, and he is the Mighty, the Merciful. It is the promise of God; God does not break his promises, but most people do not know it.” (Rome 30:1-6).

The verse suggests that Muhammad and his early community sided with the eastern Roman empire against the Sasanian Iranians. I think it was because he saw the Sasanians as aggressors. Also, Jews and Christians are called in the Qur’an “people of the book” and promised salvation if they behave themselves, as fellow monotheists (Q. 2:62).

In fact, in his Muhammad and the Believers the great historian Fred Donner at the University of Chicago argued that Muhammad’s movement was an ecumenical one of believers in the new scripture, Jews and Christians who were allies of one another.

I accepted Donner’s findings in my own book on this period,

The Iranians were forced out of Egypt and the Levant by early 630 and eastern Roman rule was restored. Heraclius made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, celebrating its return to Christian from Zoroastrian hands.

Unfortunately for Heraclius, in the mid-630s, Arabic-speaking Muslims took over Syria and the Palestines, defeating his armies at Yarmouk.

Again, just as they did with the Zoroastrian armies of Sasanian Iran, the Christian monks alleged death and destruction of churches and other buildings on the part of the Muslims.

But that kind of thing just does not show up in the archeological record. There may have been deaths. War is hell. But razed cities, there for the most part don’t seem to be.

Israeli archeologist Cinammon told Haaretz, ““The Islamic conquest was not involved in any destruction, as they were well aware of the economic value of the agricultural hinterland in this area” (i.e. Galilee).

And what Professor Cytryn-Silverman has found out about early Muslim-ruled Tiberias vindicates Fred Donner’s view that early Islam was ecumenical and relatively tolerant.

By the way, the eastern Roman Empire was not tolerant or ecumenical. It is alleged that Heraclius, on taking back Palestine, wanted to make all the Jews convert to Christianity because he was angry that some of them had sided with Iran. One of his predecessors, the Christian emperor Maurice, had pagans in Harran thrown to the lions. The Arab Muslim empire, like all empires, was spread by the sword. Islam as a religion? No.

My remarks are drawn in large part from my own book,

“In the midst of the dramatic seventh-century war between two empires, Muhammad was a spiritual seeker in search of community and sanctuary.
Many observers stereotype Islam and its scripture as inherently extreme or violent-a narrative that has overshadowed the truth of its roots. In this masterfully told account, Dr. Cole takes us back to Islam’s — and the Prophet Muhammad’s-origin story.

You can purchase Dr. Cole’s book “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the clash of Empires” with our friends from Novel Idea Bookstore.”

Muslim Societies Global Perspectives: “MSGP Lecture by Dr. Juan Cole: Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the clash of Empires.”

The inscription says, “God, forgive Muhammad the Prophet, and join with him his wives, and, God, forgive the male and female believers, and forgive Salih.

سلمت يمينك أخي أحمد وبارك الله فيكم وفي جهودكم
هذا نقش قيم جداً في الدعاء للنبي ﷺ ولأزواجه
أمهات المؤمنين رضي الله عنهن وللمؤمنين والمؤمنات
ولصالح كاتبه وهذا ثاني نقش يذكر فيه #أزواج_النبي_ﷺ

– اللهم اغفر لمحمد النبي وألحق به أزواجه
اللهم اغفر للمؤمنين والمؤمنات ولصالح . https://t.co/XhGas3I3b7 pic.twitter.com/Gj6jAzaFyS

— نوادر الآثار والنقوش?? (@mohammed93athar) February 21, 2020

As Mr. al-Magthawi notes, this is an extremely valuable historical document, likely from the first or second Muslim century (600s or 700s). It, like other early inscriptions, shows piety toward the figure of Muhammad, who is here called simply, “the Prophet.” He is depicted as human, and as needing God’s forgiveness.

It is the first inscription known to mention the wives (in the plural) of the Prophet. Another inscription published on Twitter by Mr. al-Maghthawi mentioned A’isha bint Abi Bakr, , whom later Muslim sources identify as the third wife of Muhammad.

I presume that the phrase “join his wives with him” is a prayer that they join him in paradise.

I discuss the life of Muhammad in my new book, soon out in paperback:

The inscription calls Muhammad’s followers “the believers” rather than “Muslims,” which University of Chicago historian Fred Donner has argued was the typical diction in early Islam. This way of speaking may indicate that the inscription is first century A.H.

The inscription is especially attentive to women, mentioning the Prophet’s wives as well as the Prophet, and the female believes as well as the male ones.

These recently-discovered rock inscriptions are so valuable because our literary sources for early Islam are either very late, from the 760s into the ninth and tenth centuries, or are by outsiders writing in Greek or Syriac.

The Qur’an itself, the Muslim scripture, is said by the Muslim tradition to have been recited by the Prophet 610-632 A.D., and archeological and other findings increasingly make those dates plausible. The Qur’an speaks about the wives of the Prophet, though it does not mention any by name. So the rock inscription supports the historicity of those verses.

Mr. al-Maghthawi also recently published an early inscription by an Muslim woman named Zubaydah.

It asks God to forgive her her sins and acknowledges that this will not take place unless God is well-pleased with her.

#نقوش_إسلامية نسائية تنشر لأول مرة من بادية #المدينة_المنورة :

? اللهم اغفر لزبيدة ذنبها ولا تمتها إلا وأنت عنها راضي ?

هذا ما كتبته زبيدة رضي الله عنها في شعب نائيٍ بين جبال المدينة

رحمها الله ورضي عنها #نساء_خطاطات pic.twitter.com/U7zIlqQmQ3

— نوادر الآثار والنقوش?? (@mohammed93athar) February 21, 2020