New Book: The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity*

New Book: The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity*

AlAzmeh coverAziz al-Azmeh’s new book, The Arabs and Islam in Late Antiquity: A Critique of Approaches to Arabic Sources, is a critical study of Arabic textual sources for the history of the Arabs in late antique times, during the centuries immediately preceding Muhammad and up to and including the Umayyad period. Its purpose is to consider the value and relevance of these sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, cultural and religious history of the Arabs as they were still pagans, and to reconstruct the emergence of Muhammadan and immediately post-Muhammadan religion and polity.

For this religion (including the composition and canonization of the Qur’an), the label Paleo-Islam has been coined, in order to lend historical specificity to this particular period, distinguishing it from what came before and what was to come later, all the while indicating continuities that do not, in themselves, belie the specificity attributed to this period of very rapid change. This is argued further in Aziz Al-Azmeh’s The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People (Cambridge University Press, 2014), to which this book is both a companion and a technical preface.

Al-Azmeh illustrates his arguments through examination of orality and literacy, transmission, ancient Arabic poetry, the corpus of Arab heroic lore (ayyam), the early narrative, the Qur’an, and other literary sources. The work includes a very extensive bibliography of the works cited.

* This post is based on the publisher’s announcement. The book is the first in the Gerlach Press series, Theories and Paradigms of Islamic Studies.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2014. All rights reserved.

Video lecture: The Influence of the Qur’an on Western Literature

A lecture on “The Influence of the Qur’an on Western Literature,” by Robert Irwin—given at the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe (CHASE) at the University of London’s Warburg Institute—can be viewed in its entirety here.

Robert Irwin is a widely-published author of both fiction and non-fiction works on the Arab world. He taught Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews and also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford.

The conference during which the lecture took place last year was titled “Translating the Qur’an” and was organized by Charles Burnett, Alastair Hamilton, and Jan Loop.

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Stay tuned next week for a special web event: IQSA’s online publication of three papers by Drs. Aziz al-Azmeh, Alain George, and Tarif Khalidi.

© International Qur’anic Studies Association, 2013. All rights reserved.