medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 17/2022

The blinding of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VI in Constantinople in August 797 and his overthrow by his mother Eirene, who then ruled as the first female »emperor« of the Eastern Roman Empire until 802, was used as legitimation for the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans on 25 December 800, by contemporaries in Western Europe. Some observers in the West may have even interpreted the downfall of the Eastern Roman emperor and his replacement by a woman as sign of an impending collapse of the Roman Empire and the entire world order, as already expected (based on chiliastic calculations). We equally find indications of apocalyptic expectations in Constantinople, where Constantineʹs blinding was linked with a spectacular celestial manifestation of divine disapproval – a darkening of the sun for 17 days. In this paper, this obfuscation of the sun is compared with the description of other atmospheric and climatic phenomena in the 8th and 9th centuries, as well as before and after this period. In addition, natural scientific data is used to disprove earlier hypotheses on the physical background to this event and to present a more probable scenario (i.e., the impacts of one or more volcanic eruptions) for the darkening of 797 and other phenomena, which provided a peculiar »atmospheric« framework for the interpretation of the events between the downfall of Constantine VI and the coronation of Charlemagne by contemporaries.

Keywords: Byzantine history, early medieval history, Carolingian empire, astronomy, vulcanology, climate history, Medieval Mediterranean, moral meteorology

This thematic section unearths several ways professionals from a variety of religious communities in the Near East collaborated with one another during the medieval period. Modern scholars of intellectual history have often attempted to trace connections in medieval texts across the religious spectrum, but it has been difficult to pin down the interpersonal circumstances behind these and other interactions. This is at least in part because scientific, philosophical, and theological treatises rarely refer to these personal relationships explicitly, leaving researchers to turn to other kinds of works for such details: biographies, chronicles, hagiographies, and documentary sources. But it then remains to come to terms with the historiographical perspectives of the authors of these works. For example, the authors of Arabic biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt literature) have provided some of the richest sources for person-to-person exchange in Near Eastern intellectual history, but they filter and taxonomize their subjects to focus on individuals, overwhelmingly men, who can be seen as formative for particular classes or categories (ṭabaqāt) of society. Disciplinary segmentation has made it especially difficult to answer questions such as how much »neutral« space there was in interreligious knowledge exchange in the Near East, or whether fields such as medicine became »Islamicized« through the exclusion of non-Muslims in the teaching, study, or practice of the field. The authors of the research articles here (contributors to a virtual forum hosted by the BMBF-funded »Communities of Knowledge« project) take various approaches to these problems of explicating silent sources, interpreting historiographical constructions, and bridging disciplinary segmentation. Some put particular texts under the microscope, pointing out new evidence of specific interactions on the basis of close readings or the examination of texts in a palimpsested manuscript. Some zoom out slightly on these interactions by making fresh comparisons between sources in differing genres or languages. All focus on the interreligious dimensions of exchange and, wherever possible, on the interpersonal engagements that brought these about. Reports from two research projects complement these by taking macro-level approaches that involve multiple languages, several genres, and broad regions. Overall, this thematic collection highlights the interpersonal and collaborative aspects of work by Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Muslims during the Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE) with the aim of stimulating new research approaches that overcome previous genre limitations and disciplinary boundaries.

Keywords: Near East/Middle East, knowledge production, interreligious exchange, Abrahamic religions, medieval science, medieval medicine, biographical literature, Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE), Arabic, Syriac

Naṣīḥat al-muḥibb fī dhamm al-takassub bi-l-ṭibb, a largely autobiographical treatise by the otherwise unknown Cairene physician Ibrāhīm ibn Yuḥannā al-Wajīh al-Qalyūbī (fl. second half of the seventh century AH/ thirteenth century CE), offers a unique account of the lives of street medical practitioners. Although written as a piece of advice warning students about the dangers that the practice of medicine poses for them in this world and the hereafter, this work is a treasure trove of information about the life of physicians beyond the walls of the court and the attitude of the common people towards them and their art. In this essay I will survey and discuss al-Qalyūbī’s complaints about the poor living conditions of physicians, the challenge of their authority by female medical practitioners, the predominance of Jews in the profession, and the dangers that the practice of medicine entails, according to al-Qalyūbī, for the intellect and the religious convictions of physicians.

Keywords: Islamic medicine, history of science, Mamluks, Religious polemics, female medical practitioners, midwives, Jews, Antisemitism, unbelief in Islam

This article uses Arabic sources to examine the Islamic-era mowbed (Zoroastrian chief priest) in Abbasid society, in what I argue is the conscious continuation of the mowbed’s pre-Islamic role as judge, scholar, sage, and advisor to kings. Moreover, I argue that the mowbed used his status to promote the standing of the Zoroastrian community, as well as to assert the authority of the priesthood within that community – an authority which was negotiated under Muslim rule and through Islamic and particularly Shiʿi figures, above all ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661 CE). Muslims were already debating the status of Zoroastrians, or Magians, as part of the ahl al-dhimma – with Shiʿi strands of tradition supporting more favorable views of the Magians. We should understand mowbeds as part of this dialectic, seeking the favor of caliphs, amirs, and sometimes rival sectarian leaders. As well as providing a survey of Arabic references to mowbeds in the Islamic period, this article will study two relevant Arabic texts: the first is a previously untranslated risāla composed in 986 on behalf of the Buyid amir Ṣamṣām al-Dawla by Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābi ̉ (d. 994), in which Magians, and specifically »the sons of Ādhurbādh b. Mārsfand«, claim to have a letter of protection from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib which grants them an exemption from paying the jizya; the second is a passage in al-Bīrūnī’s (d. 1048) al-Āthār al-bāqiya, which also asserts that the Zoroastrian priesthood was descended from Ādhurbādh b. Mārsfand – and moreover that access to knowledge of the Avesta was certified through written documents.

Keywords: Zoroastrians, priesthood, Authority, mowbed, dhimma, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, Buyids, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla, Shiʿism

As Christians and Muslims encountered each other in the Middle East from the beginning of Islam in the 7th century CE onward, theology was not only a field of setting boundaries to distinguish one’s own community from the other but also an area of mutual influence between the communities. This article analyzes two letters of the East Syriac patriarch Timothy I (d. 823), both of which have an apologetic agenda but at the same time demonstrate Timothy’s familiarity with the Muslim intellectual milieu of his day. To defend the Christian doctrine of the Trinity against Muslim objections, Timothy made reference to the Islamic doctrine of divine attributes. He used relational attributes which consist of a subject, an act, and an object to show that there must be a certain plurality as well as relationships between the subjects, acts, and objects of the divine attributes. These relationships serve Timothy as a proof for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In this article, Timothy’s arguments and the teachings he ascribed to his Muslim counterparts are compared with what modern scholars have reconstructed about the teachings of Muslim thinkers from Timothy’s period; so far, such comparisons have been done for Christian Arabic writings more commonly than for Syriac ones. The result of this comparison shows that the positions of Timothy’s Muslim counterparts approximate very closely the ideas of the Muʿtazilite Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf. Thus, based on their content, it is possible to connect Timothy’s letters to the teachings of a concrete person among Muslim intellectuals of the period or to circles where Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf seems to have been somehow involved.

Keywords: eighth century, ninth century, theology, Christianity, Islam, Christian-Muslim relations, Middle East, Church of the East, Patriarch Timothy I, Muʿtazila, Abū l-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf

This paper studies a palimpsest fragment from the Qubbat al-khazna in Damascus, which presents a very interesting composition. The Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) scriptio inferior, already identified as a biblical text (Genesis 19.1-5, 7-10), coexists with the Arabic scriptio superior. This latter, except for the identification of its general content, has not been studied so far. The Arabic text is an excerpt belonging to the medical work entitled Mukhtaṣar fī l-ṭibb (Compendium of medicine) – otherwise known from just one manuscript witness, Rabat, Al-Khizāna al-ʿāmma, 2640 (D 1442c) – written by the Andalusian jurist ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb (d. 238 AH/853 AD). This paper, focused on the textual analysis of the excerpt, provides its edition and translation. The study of the text is integrated with a palaeographical and codicological examination of the Arabic script. These multidisciplinary investigations represent the starting point for some insights related to the history of the fragment. Specifically, a Sinaitic-Palestinian origin, linked to a monastic environment, is suggested, in consideration of some peculiar features: the botanical-pharmaceutical knowledge displayed in the Arabic text of the scriptio superior, the palimpsest order of the fragment, as well as the significant phenomenon of the discard of the religious text (the Bible in CPA) of the scriptio inferior, which can be contextualised within the »arabicisation« process that characterised the monastic milieu of the area from the second/eighth century onwards.

Keywords: Arabic, Palimpsest, Ibn Ḥabīb, Qubbat al-khazna, botanical-pharmaceutical

This paper explores Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist, a major primary source for Abbasid intellectual history. Although its importance for the field has been acknowledged since its first edition at the end of the nineteenth century, the studies dealing with this encyclopedic work as a whole are remarkably rare, since its material has mostly been used by researchers looking for biographic details regarding specific scholars of the Islamic Middle Ages. Our research aims to examine how Ibn al-Nadīm depicts the religious affiliation of scholars and cases of interaction between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim intellectuals. It focuses on the seventh section (maqāla) of the work, which deals with the rational sciences, a field well known for involving scholars from different religious backgrounds in Abbasid centers of knowledge, especially in the context of translation activities. After some methodological remarks, two main lines of inquiry guide our study. First, we analyze whether Ibn al-Nadīm explicitly acknowledges the religious identity of the scholars he mentions, with what vocabulary, and in which circumstances. Second, we investigate the cases of »interreligious scholarly collaboration«, when Ibn al-Nadīm depicts scholars from different religious backgrounds working together, in order to determine his conception of the knowledge produced by the Abbasid intellectual milieu. We will argue that the way he deals with interreligious relations results in emphasizing the existence of a common knowledge, in Arabic, that is shared beyond communal boundaries. By focusing on the inner structure of this work, we aim to shed new light on the question of interreligious collaboration in Abbasid society, as well as to lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the relationship between the Fihrist and its social and cultural context.

Keywords: Ibn al-Nadīm, Abbasid intellectual history, rational sciences, Islamic sciences, religious affiliation, biographical dictionary

The medieval Middle East, at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, included more distinct yet intersecting literary traditions in more languages than any other part of the premodern world. While several of these literary traditions were religiously demarcated, others such as Arabic and Persian were multireligious written cultures. Despite this, the religious diversity of this region is often conceptualized as separate communities who sometimes interacted. Religion was certainly a socially relevant category employed by medieval people to organize their world, and yet people from every religion wrote about the same government, the same society, and largely the same culture, a culture expressed in religious multiplicity. A new digital research project has developed a reference tool (the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East, HIMME) to demonstrate the shared culture and society of the diverse medieval Middle East. It provides a union index to selected primary sources in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, indexing the people, places, and practices mentioned in each literary tradition. The result is that someone interested in, for example, the famous counter-Crusader Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn) can search a database and discover relevant primary sources in unexpected languages such as Syriac as well as the expected Arabic and Latin sources, while the later conqueror Timur Lenk is also mentioned in Greek and Armenian texts that might easily be missed. This article offers an overview of the research tool (published on August 1, 2021), and a discussion of its scope, as well as suggestions for how it might be used to research Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Middle East.

Keywords: digital humanities,, diversity, Multilingualism, Middle East, Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, Persian, Greek, Hebrew

The ERC-funded research project »Embedding Conquest«, based at Leiden University, studies the mechanics by which early Islamic rule took root in a tapestry of diverse territories and different social contexts. Based on a large corpus of documentary and literary texts, especially letters, the research team has identified elements of political, territorial, and institutional cohesion stemming from interpersonal ties of loyalty and dependency binding individuals to each other and to the state. This contribution presents the project’s main scope and achievements. Additionally, it focuses on multilingualism, highlighting the participation of people from different religious groups in shaping early Islamic rule, in line with this special issue’s focus on collaboration among Muslims, Jews, and Christians as colleagues in the early Islamic period.

Keywords: early Islamic empire, early Islamicate societies, empire studies, Multilingualism