Without throwing out any alternative theories outright, isn't is possible that Muhammed is describing areas more like northern Arabia, Palestine, or Syria as a means of legitimizing Muslim desire to control those areas? As a merchant even if he hadn't spent much time in those places he'd certainly be aware of them from other traders. The mere mention of crops that don't exist in the Hejaz doesn't mean that Islam arose there. That doesn't mean we need to accept Muslim claims about the origin of the faith any more than we need to blindly accept Christian claims about the early church, but it doesn't require alternative theories either.
What are the biggest mysteries of the Dark Ages?
- Thread starter Mr_Fanboy
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There were thousands of Jews and Christians living and / or trading in the Hejaz at that time. They were an important cultural influence there, even on Arabian polytheists. It's very easy to imagine (or, rather, to understand) that Hejazi Arabs were perfectly well aware of the conditions and traditions of the Levant, even if they had never personally been there.
The material "evidence" for this hypothesis smells very similar to that of the Shakespeare authorship nonsense: a massive underestimation of premodern people's worldiness and intelligence.
Being quite deeply into the field, I tend to sympathise with your approach, but I do also take a more nuanced position. I think that the most radical revisionist positions have been, effectively, disproven beyond doubt. We now KNOW that 'Hagarism' is rubbish, though that does not automatically detract from later, more serious work by Crone herself.
I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about history 'til I signed on here
Never realized before what a great "teaching tool" for real history, that alternative history really is....
You know, the thing about Crone is that her work on Sasanid and early Islamic Iran, her other claim to fame, is like... well okay I can't really compare it to alternative accounts because I haven't read too many, but it is very well argued. Like I forget the title but this one paper she had on "Mazdakism", this thing that all kinds of people have like one paragraph apiece on and those paragraphs declare it everything from "royalist religious communism" to "anarchist polyandry" as if the point it to make it shocking as possible while being as indefinite as possible...
And then Crone, with reference to details about the reign of Kavad (came to the throne as a very young man without many allies, deposed, returned to power through alliance with the White Huns), economic policy (Sasanids switching from taxes in kind to taxes in coin under Kavad and Khosrau I), and religious history (continuity of "Mazdakist" belief with the earlier Zartosht Khrosakan)-- all of this, with Islamic sources and the Denkard and other stuff, harmonized into a narrative whereby a young, ambitious, but isolated king promotes a controversial belief to attack his aristocracy, then returns to power to oppose the same belief in a mass form deployed against his taxes, a policy continued by his successor. The finer points of what Mazdakist belief are considered to be by Crone, I don't remember-- but the core narrative seems to align well with, I don't know, human nature or economic and political motives or whatever. And the sources seemed to be represented faithfully enough, no translations or subsequent arguments seemed that weird (to a nonspecialist like me).
Just... we go calling people a pox on this or that field but maybe that wasn't their main hustle or they had different motives when doing other stuff. And on that note, we may as well add pre-Islamic Iran to this thread. For example, how was it that memory of the Achaemenids all but died out except for Darius I and III, and Artaxerxes forgot-the-number... and how is that related to the way that Persian writing developed from inscriptions Aramaic of coins and tablets to the Pahlavi scripts (to the exclusion of Persian cuneiform), and was that process localized to the subkings of Pars under the Seleucids and Arsacids... the old "where did Zoroastrianism come from and what might the Denkard not be telling us", the place of the Academy of Gondeshapur in relation to contemporaneous intellectual exchanges from Syria to India and how much that figured into the later Islamic intellectual universe...
And then Crone, with reference to details about the reign of Kavad (came to the throne as a very young man without many allies, deposed, returned to power through alliance with the White Huns), economic policy (Sasanids switching from taxes in kind to taxes in coin under Kavad and Khosrau I), and religious history (continuity of "Mazdakist" belief with the earlier Zartosht Khrosakan)-- all of this, with Islamic sources and the Denkard and other stuff, harmonized into a narrative whereby a young, ambitious, but isolated king promotes a controversial belief to attack his aristocracy, then returns to power to oppose the same belief in a mass form deployed against his taxes, a policy continued by his successor. The finer points of what Mazdakist belief are considered to be by Crone, I don't remember-- but the core narrative seems to align well with, I don't know, human nature or economic and political motives or whatever. And the sources seemed to be represented faithfully enough, no translations or subsequent arguments seemed that weird (to a nonspecialist like me).
Just... we go calling people a pox on this or that field but maybe that wasn't their main hustle or they had different motives when doing other stuff. And on that note, we may as well add pre-Islamic Iran to this thread. For example, how was it that memory of the Achaemenids all but died out except for Darius I and III, and Artaxerxes forgot-the-number... and how is that related to the way that Persian writing developed from inscriptions Aramaic of coins and tablets to the Pahlavi scripts (to the exclusion of Persian cuneiform), and was that process localized to the subkings of Pars under the Seleucids and Arsacids... the old "where did Zoroastrianism come from and what might the Denkard not be telling us", the place of the Academy of Gondeshapur in relation to contemporaneous intellectual exchanges from Syria to India and how much that figured into the later Islamic intellectual universe...
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In my opinion, the evidence against this is now overwhelming (it was not in the Seventies, to be fair, if one wanted to take a critical approach).
There is a quite enough of converging evidence that Hejaz was not exactly that much of a backwater. There is a fuckton we still do not know, and the Muslim tradition has enough internal contradictions in its details to warrant critical scrutiny, even if the general picture should be taken as valid. A lot seems to suggest political crisis and, well, 'globalization' in Arabia before the Prophet.
And what that has to do with Islam? If anything showing how the mess Iran was, show how easier the Rashidun has it
Well there’s a easy solution, those things was introduced later into the Quran. We know the Quran was only standardized later, because there were different Qurans so one of the Caliph selected one text and destroyed the rest. We also know the early Quran was verbal transmitted.
Seeing as their language still survives, the believed romanization of them seem more a result of the Latin successor Frankish kingdom of Neustria-Aquitaine taking their name, while the Frankish homeland itself simply taking the name ”The People Land”, because they had to share it with closely related ethnic groups.
We do actually have something approaching material proof of very early standardization of the Qur'anic text, and of a single manuscript archetype for most of the earliest testimonies, though, to be fair, these are fragmentary. As far as I can tell, available evidence appears to confirm the general lines of the accepted traditional accounts by Muslims as to how the Qur'an was written down in standard form. For example, early fragments all show similar orthographic idiosincracies. There are scholars who dispute this, and some of them offer some good arguments, but in general, the Qur'an as we know it now must be understood as a document from Hejaz in the first half of the seventh century.
there the myth of the other Qurans, the thing is...those used non-standard spelling, some even used latin,. syriac or greek loanword as some scribes liked those more, the standardization was removing that, if anything people forget about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecca_Province#Geography mecca was one of the greenest region back them, before water scarcity and erosion made the modern desert we saw
Someone mentioned it earlier, but don't forget the history of Russia, at least before the mid 10th century. Just how much influence did the Swedish adventurers really have?
So did the guy cherry-pick his data or falsify it? Do we have any alternatives to the work he did showing what he got wrong?
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The name of Russia comes from them, if a people change their name to another people’s word for sailor/adventure, I guess those adventures had a lot of influence.
Then the Nordic Rulers started to have names like Svaitoslav.
Any mysteries relating to the Late Roman Empire that you wish were revealed? Me? Aside from the fate of Glycerius, I would say how exactly the Senate in Rome ceased to exist as its last recorded action was to build a monument to Phocas before its building was turned into a church.
On Mecca , if it was such a backwater region then why did Muslims hold it in such high regard . Why would a Later Caliphate which was based in Mesopotamia spread propaganda that Mecca was the Holy city instead of a closer and more loyal one ? This simply does not make sense to me . Its just baffling to Me that any Caliph would chose to make a faraway backwater city with an unruly populace as “The Holy City“. I know there is reasonable evidence but its just more plausible that the Hejazi Muslims to some extent admired the relatively Urbanized Civilization of Northern Arabia compared to what Mecca was , so tried to exaggerate about Mecca and as @Nivek pointed out , Mecca was likely greener back then .
Carter I'm Yog
Banned
I can sympathize with your sentiment presented here, but I am more interested in how you managed to swap names in quotes. I didn't realize you were replying to my post at first glance, then I was like "that's not my name but my words".
Could agree with this. Despite being defanged they were no less politically active in the fifth century. Maybe the sixth century wars hollowed out their powerbases, then they limped on and faded away.
This is what people generally call cultural interaction. For another "ruling minority impacts ruled majority culturally" example, many old Beijingers call lakes "seas", because the Manchus did. So when the "Central-South Sea" is mentioned, it's actually referring to a palace built near an artificial lake in central-south Beijing, which just so happens to be an important PRC center of government today.
The Rashidun had it easy because Iran had two unique disadvantages in OTL 628:
- It lost the greatest war it ever launched
- A certain man named Salman the Persian, or if you prefer Arabic transliteration, Salman al-Farsi
Salman provides an excellent bridge to understanding how Muhammad, a career tradesman, not only started a religion, but also how that religion stuck with Iranians since its inception - the simple answer is, because Muhammad had a professional Iranian theologian as his consultant when he was designing his newest product. Not a wonder certain extremists call Salman "Iran's greatest traitor in all of history, gravedigger of the Good Religion (i.e. Mazdayasna (i.e. Zoroastrianism))".
Personally, I think Salman has done his job of product consultant well, but it's probably a combination of that, Muslims going to war with each other way too often in their first century, and the general unimportance of abstract theology in early Muslim consciousness that left most of their "theological disputes" being about "who should have been the first Caliph". A dispute too often resolved by the sword than by the pen, rather unfortunate for a religion of peace.
One of the sermons of Pope Gregory the Great complained about the decline of the Roman Senate and the senatorial elite, so that seems like a reasonable guess.