66
Qur’an: 53.27.
67
See, for instance, his letter to the Colossians: 2.18.
68
Canon 35 of the Council of Laodicea.
69
Crone (2010), p. 171.
70
Qur’an: 4.119, 6.138 and 6.121, respectively.
71
Ibid.: 4.121.
72
Qur’an: 6.99. Mecca, in the laconic phrase of Donner (1981), “is located in an area ill suited to agriculture” (p. 15).
73
Ibid.: 56.63–4.
74
The poem is exceedingly obscure. A commentary by a later Muslim commentator sought to explain its meaning: “Badr and Kutayfah are two places, the distance between which is vast. It is as though they have come together due to the speed of this camel.” Poem and commentary alike appear in
Six Early Arab Poets
, p. 95. My thanks to Salam Rassi for the translation.
75
Qur’an: 3.97.
76
Khuzistan Chronicle
: 38 (translation by Salam Rassi). The authorship is dated to the 660s.
77
Qur’an: 3.96.
78
Qur’an: 3.97. The Arabic for “place” in this verse is
maqam
.
79
Ibid.: 2.125.
80
For the difficulty of squaring the Qur’anic accounts of the
Maqam Ibrahim
with the stone of the same name in Mecca, see Hawting (1982)—an essay to which this chapter is hugely indebted. Although Hawting himself does not allude to the sanctuary at Mamre, he cites an intriguing Muslim tradition in which Abraham is guided to the House at Bakka by three heavenly beings. As Hawting points out (p. 41), “this is reminiscent of Abraham’s three visitors in the Genesis story, one of whom could be identified with the Lord before whom Abraham ministered in the
maqom
”—which took place, of course, at Mamre.
81
Qur’an: 37.133–8.
82
See Chapter 4, n. 90, above.
83
Qur’an: 2.128.
84
The Quraysh, along with Mecca, Muhammad and someone called Majid, are mentioned in the final line of the papyrus fragment that also name-checks the Battle of Badr for the first time. Its editor dated this fragment to the mid-eighth century (Grohmann (1963), text 71). A group of people called the Qrshtn are mentioned in a south Arabian inscription dating from the AD 270s, and some scholars have interpreted this as a possible allusion to Qurayshi women. However, that theory is most implausible, because the Qrshtn seem to be ambassadors on a trade mission.
85
This is mentioned by a ninth-century historian named Ibn Qutayba, and is quoted by Shahid (1989), p. 356. It is indicative of an enduring ambiguity in the Muslim sources that Qusayy, although supposedly born in Mecca, is described as having been settled on the Palestinian frontier.
86
See Margoliouth, p. 313. It is telling that a theory floated by Muslim commentators suggests that “Quraysh” derived from the Arabic word
taqarrush
—“gathering”—another word that powerfully conveys a sense of
foederati
. The great scholar al-Azraqi wrote, “It is said that the Quraysh were so named on account of [their] gathering (
tajammu
) around Quşay … For in some dialects of the Arabs,
tajammu
(= meeting/gathering) is referred to as
taqarrush
” (p. 108; translation by Salam Rassi, to whom I am also indebted for the reference from Margoliouth).
87
See, for instance, Shahid (1995), p. 788, for the strong likelihood that Arethas could speak Syriac.
88
Qur’an: 10.61.
89
By and large, commentators on the Qur’an explained the summer and winter trips as being to Syria and Yemen, respectively. However, there was a raft of alternative explanations, too. See Crone (1987b), pp. 205–11.
90
Jacob of Edessa: 326.
91
Qur’an: 2.198.
92
Ibid.: 47.10.
93
Zukhruf
, a word that is used to mean “ornamentation” in the Qur’an, has been plausibly derived from
zograpsos
—a Greek word meaning a “painter of shields.” See Shahid (1989), p. 507.
94
Qur’an: 1.6.
95
Ibid.: 6.25.
96
Ibid.: 8.31, 25.5 and 46.17, for instance.
97
Ibid.: 26.192–6. Muslim commentators invariably equated the phrase “the Trustworthy Spirit” with the angel Gabriel—but the Qur’an never actually states that the Prophet received his revelations from Gabriel. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the much later tradition that Muhammad was addressed by an angel over the course of his prophetic career, visions of light and supernatural voices are notable by their absence from the Qur’an. As Uri Rubin (1995) has argued, “the basic tale of Muhammad’s first revelations accords with biblical rather than quranic conventions, and the story was initially designed to meet apologetic needs” (p. 109).
98
Ibid.: 41.17.
99
Ibid.: 4.100.
100
Ibid.: 8.1–2.
101
Ibid.: 8.26.
102
Ibid.: 2.119.
103
Ibid.: 33.9.
104
For a tracing of its likely evolution, see Crone (1994).
105
Qur’an: 4.99.
106
As with virtually every aspect of the Arab invasions, precision is impossible. One source claims that the task force numbered three hundred, another that it amounted to five thousand.
107
It is typical of the murk of the sources for the Arab invasions that in one account he is named “Bryrdn.”
108
The unusually specific time and date derive from a notice in a Syrian chronicle written some time around the year 640, and which in turn seems to draw on a near-contemporary record. See Palmer, Brock and Hoyland, pp. 18–19.
109
Procopius:
On Buildings
, 2.9.4.
110
For the decayed state of towns in Syria and Palestine in the wake of the plague, see Kennedy (1985).
111
Sozomen: 6.38.
112
Anastasius of Sinai: 1156C.
113
As with the origins of the Qur’an, so with the course of the Arab conquests: the range of scholarly opinion is dizzying. Christian sources are contemporary, but too patchy to provide anything like a coherent narrative; Arabic sources are plentiful, but frustratingly late. The contradictory nature of the evidence from Arab historians for the Battle of the Yarmuk is best set out in Donner’s magisterial survey of the Islamic conquests (1981, pp. 133–48). However, even he comes across as a model of guarded optimism when compared to Lawrence Conrad, whose ground-breaking essay on the conquest of the obscure Levantine island of Arwad served as a landmine beneath the entire project of reconstructing the Arab invasions from Muslim sources. For the most recent attempt to clear up the mess, see Howard-Johnston (2010), who locates the decisive Roman defeat not at the Yarmuk but near Damascus.
114
Anastasius of Sinai: 1156C.
115
Baladhuri, p. 210.
116
Given, as Donner (1981) wistfully comments, “the chronologically ambiguous nature of many of the accounts about the conquest, it is impossible to do more than guess at the true dates involved” (p. 212).
117
Sebeos, 137.
118
Tabari: Vol. 12, p. 64.
119
Qur’an: 4.36.
120
Contemporaneous reports on the battle outside Gaza seem to imply that Muhammad was still alive at the time. The first text to mention the existence of an Arabian prophet, and which has been most plausibly dated to the summer of 634, refers to “the prophet who
has
appeared to the Saracens” (
Teachings of Jacob
: 5.16) Another, dated to around 640, and the first to mention him by name, describes the battle as having been won by “the Arabs of Muhammad” (quoted by Hoyland (1997), p. 120.) For a survey of later Christian and Samaritan sources that presume the survival of Muhammad into 634, see Crone and Cook, pp. 152–3, n. 7. As they point out, “The convergence is impressive”—and proof of just how slippery is our evidence for the Prophet’s life.