When recently reading with growing interest Patricia Crone’s latest book about The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran – Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012) I came across a most unlikely reference, Reinhold Loeffler’s interviews of Boyer Ahmadian tribe villagers in the southern Zagros mountains in the early and mid 1970s (Islam in Practice – Religious Beliefs in a Persian Village. State University of New York Press, New York 1988). Crone noted (p. 210) that
“In a tribal village in the southern Zagros mountains studied in the 1970s there were still people who believed the duration of the world to be 50,000 years; others dismissed this as an erroneous idea of the mullahs (sic), claiming that it was the Day of Judgement that would last 50,000 years, a well-known popular view in Iran. Among the adherents of the erroneous idea of the mullahs was an old trader, who said that there were 50,000 years from Adam to the Day of Judgement, of which 11,380 years had already elapsed; but there had been another kind of men before Adam, and before that as well, for the world had never been empty and never would be; after the day of judgement God would make another creation. The cycles postulated by this man, a devout person who served as the model of orthodoxy in the village, were not limited to seven, and he was not a believer in reincarnation, but apart from that he was unwittingly perpetuating a tradition first attested for the followers of Abdallah b. Muawiya.”
(Abdallah b. Muawiya was a cousin of the fourth Shi’a imam’s son, Zayd ibn Ali, who revolted in Kufa in 739/40 against the Umayyads. Abdallah and the Harbiyya rebelled in western Iran after Zayd had been killed in the battle in Kufa and his son Yahiya was killed in Jawzjan in Khurasan in 743.)
Reinhold Loeffler and his wife Erika Friedl had settled and lived with the people in the remote village altogether for more than seven years. They became friendly with Loeffler and Friedl so that both, besides their fieldwork as anthropologists, were able to record intensive and quite intimate talks with inhabitants of the village. Loeffler’s account comprises altogether 21 interviews about religion (“world views”) with a cross-section of the male villagers with quite different backgrounds, the mullah, teachers, traders, an orthodox, a fundamentalist, a doubtful etc. There is remarkable consonance when it comes to the core (as the villagers understand it) of Islam, demanding strive for pleasing God by working hard, caring for people avoiding day-by-day temptations and sins, emulating Ali, Husayn and the other Imams (not to forget the Prophet). About which sins will be forgiven and when and how. And tiny but interesting differences as regards cosmology, the Day of Judgment, and what happens with the soul during one’s demise and the coming of the former.
After 40 years (and 33 years into the Iranian Islamic Revolution), this world appears to be gone now, although I am not sure as regards the century (millennia?)-old religious beliefs of the common people in Iran’s countryside. When reading Loeffler’s series of interviews a disdain for the mullah in particular and the ulama in general is striking (while the shah’s dictatorial rule over Iran was, in general, regarded benevolent, even agreeable to God). A large number of folk-beliefs which are expressed in the interviews would not really please the Ayatollahs presently ruling Iran. It would be interesting to further assess whether Karl Marx’ statement, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” does really apply here. These settled tribesmen still live in accord with nature which might at time be utterly cruel. But nature doesn’t oppress, although it needs to be comprehended and controlled in order to avert harm, illness, or destitution; to meet some of the basic aspirations in life, health, marriage, children and their well-being. Few of these, well, superstitious beliefs expressed here are actually based on orthodox Shi’a Islam as imposed on the Iranians after 1979.
Both Loeffler and Friedl do author each of a chapter of the Boyer Ahmadi (supplemented with a few rare pictures taken in the 1980s by Nasrollah Kasraian) in Richard Tapper’s and Jon Thompson’s The Nomadic Peoples of Iran (Thames & Hudson, London 2002) about which I had written before, see here.
Up to the so-called Sunni Revival long after the conquest of much of the Islamic World, and foremost Iran, by the Seljuqs in the first half of the 11th century, the religious denomination of Iranians has never been so clear. After the Arabs under caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab had brought the Sasanian empire and its last shah Yazdegerd III to their knees in the battles at al-Qadisiyyah (near the capital Ctesiphon) in 637 and Nahavand (near Hamadan) in 642, Iran’s state religion, Zoroastrianism, had not just vanished. Albeit victory of Islam was inevitable at first sight. The rapid Arab conquests after their Prophet Muhammad’s sudden demise in 632 took indeed place before the Muslims’ holy book, the Qur’an, had been compiled into an official, standardized, version by Uthman ibn Affan in about 650 (as legend tells). So, the conquests of Palestine and Syria in 634-6, Jerusalem and Ctesiphon in 637, and Egypt in 639 had probably little to do with a compelling new religion. One main factor for the rapid success of the Arab conquest of Iran was, of course, the peripheral location of its capital, Ctesiphon, and its early fall and that simple fact is stressed early in Patricia Crone’s new book [1] on the “nativist prophets” [2] of the first two centuries after the conquest in Greater Iran .
How did the Iranians respond to forcible imposition of yet immature Islamic ideas, which, by definition, blend those of the older religions Judaism and Christianity? Well, they rebelled. But not so fast.
The Revolts
Much commenced with the Persian general Abu Muslim Khorasani (d. 755) and Islam’s third civil war (749/50) when members of the Hashimiyya in Khorasan revolted against the ruling Umayyads [3]. Abu Muslim’s origin, whose original Persian name was Behzadan, remains obscure, though. During the rebellion against the last Umayyad caliph Marwan II, Abu Muslim was sent to Khorasan by the leader of the Abbasid rebellion, Ibrahim bin Muhammad, where he headed the uprising since 747. When Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah was proclaimed first Abbasid caliph in 749, Abu Muslim assumed office as governor in Khorasan where he gained almost legendary status among Muslims (both Shi’tes and Sunnis), Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians alike. Relations with the caliph and his successor deteriorated, though. Abu Muslim was eventually ordered to Madain by caliph al-Mansur when he unavailingly tried to appoint Abu Muslim governor in Egypt and Syria. There he was killed and his mutilated body thrown into the river Tigris in 755.
The Iranian revolts took mainly place before and after this third civil war, when the Abbasid Abu-l Abbas as-Saffah (the “blood shedder”) had eventually defeated the troops of Marwan II on the banks of the Great Zab river in Northern Iraq. Times were troubled indeed. Before and after, Alids had tried to rebel as well. In Kufa, Zayd ibn Ali, son of the fourth Shi’a Imam Ali ibn Husain Zayn al-Abidin, revolted in 739/40 and was killed in a battle with the Umayyad governor there. His son Yahiya ibn Zayn continued his father’s struggle. He went to Khorasan through Mada’in and remained in disguise in Balkh until he was arrested. He was imprisoned for some time until he was able to escape after the death of Umayyad Caliph Hashim ibn Abd al-Malik with many Shi’ites from Khorasan gathering around him. He headed toward Nishapur and engaged there in a battle with its governor, Umar ibn Zurarah al-Qasri, whose army he defeated. In 743 he was wounded in the forehead at Jawzjan and killed at the battle arena at the age of only 18 years while his forces dispersed [4]. Crone mentions sources (p. 104) in her new book as to which Yahiya might have been a descendant of another propagandist in Transoxiana after Abu Muslim’s killing in 755, Ishaq al-Turk. Whether Ishak “had allegedly fled from the Umayyads to Turkish Transoxiana and later adopted Muslimi beliefs by way of camouflage” (taqiyya?) is questionable. Crone writes, “It probably reflects the fact that Yahiya b. Zayd was a hero to many of those who venerated Abu Muslim, for Yahiya was a member of the same holy family that Abu Muslim had worked for, and both had been victimised by the ‘Arabs’ who did not understand what their own prophet had preached,” and “One sub-group of the Ishaqiyya claimed that their imam had fled from the Umayyads and the Abbasids to the land of the Turks, where he was now staying and whence the mahdi would come forth, speaking only Turkish. Their Ishaq sounds like our refugee from Sunbadh’s (see below) army mixed up with Yahiya b. Zayd, the refugee from the Umayyads.” Also Abdallah ibn Mu’awiya, Zayd’s cousin and Yahiya’s uncle, and his followers, the Harbiyya/Janahiyya, rebelled after both had been killed. Ibn Mu’awiya’s revolt was joined by the Zaydiyya and even Kharijites. He was killed on behalf of the Abbasids in 748 just by Abu Muslim, to whom he had fled in hope for cooperation, while imprisoned in Herat.
Abu Muslim’s killing in 755 sparked further revolts. One of the insurgents in the Jibal was his close friend Sunbadh (d. 755), a former member of the Iranian aristocracy and now leader of the Muslimiyya. He rebelled in Rayy in 755 but was defeated after only 70 days. Sunbadh denied Abu Muslim’s death and was inclined to deify his friend. And he must have been the founder of the Khurramites, a sect and political movement which has its roots in proto-socialist Mazdakism, a heresy re-introduced in the early 6th century by a Persian reformer and religious activist, Mazdak. Khurramis were Shi’ites but most of their doctrines were those of the Zoroastrians.
As Crone stresses Khurramism was not an intrinsically subversive or rebellious creed but rather friendly and pacifist. Anyway, in Azerbaijan it was the utterly cruel and bloodthirsty Khurramite leader Babak (d. 838) who rebelled against the Abbasids under caliph al-Ma’mun, and his rebellion lasted for more than 20 years. Al-Mamun’s successor Abu Ishak al-Mut’asim appointed in 835 his general Haydar bin Kavus Afshin to fight Babak and his Khurramites in Azerbaijan. Afshin got hold of him only two years later. Babak was executed under torture in 838.
Further to the East, in Sogdia in Transoxiana, it was another ethnically Persian insurgent who went into hiding a couple of years after Abu Muslim had been killed and started a rebellion (around 768), al-Muqanna (d. 779?). It might even be that he also had been a commander under Abu Muslim. His original name was Hashim al-Hakim, or Ata, but he became famous under the name he gave himself, al-Muqanna, or the veiled one. Al-Muqanna claimed to be a prophet, or even re-incarnation of God, a role which had passed to him via Abu Muslim, Ali and Muhammad. He used magic to impress his followers, the Mubayyida. When besieged in his fortress he committed suicide. He, too, was a member of the Khurramiya. While other Khurramite followers at that time wore red clothes, those of Al-Muqanna wore white in opposition to the black clothes of the Abbasids [5].
Khurramism and Beyond
Albeit an orthodox version of Zoroastrianisms had been re-established as sort of state religion under the Sasanids (224-651 CE), there had never been only Zoroastrians in Iran. As Patricia Crone writes in her preface,
“This is a book about the Iranian response to the Muslim penetration of the Iranian countryside, the revolts that the Muslims triggered there, and the religious communities that these revolts revealed. It is also a book about a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has shown remarkable persistence in Iran over a period of two millennia. The central thesis of the book is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and has occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi’ism on Iran.”
While the first part of Crone’s book entertains and summarizes what had been published before, in particular by Elton L. Daniel, the second part deals with specific religions and their heresies and beliefs which met in pre-Islamic and early-Islamic Iran, including and with a focus on Khurramism.
The name of the Khurramis is derived from Persian khurram, “happy, cheerful”. It is a blend with much (albeit utterly heretic) Zoroastrian belief in it. Antinomianism, cosmological principles of light and darkness, repeat reincarnation of any creatures. Cleanliness and purification. Non-violence, except when raising the banner of revolt; including avoidance of killing animals and vegetarian diet, or shockingly (for Muslims) only allowing carrion. Or equally scandalous, sharing of women at least by mutual consent. Drinking wine. In brief, freedom of enjoying all kinds of pleasure as long as nobody was harmed.
For the apparent panpsychism of the Khurramis, i.e. their conviction that everything is alive and endowed with sould, spirit, or mind; and likewise their strong belief in reincarnation biblical-type monotheism was intolerably reductionist. Crone explains (p. 273ff),
“From the Khurrami point of view the Christians were better than the Jews and Muslims in that they accepted the idea of God incarnating himself in human beings and also spoke much about the holy spirit. The Gnostics were even better, and best of all were the Platonists, whether pagan, Gnostic, Christian, or Muslim. It is not for nothing than Platonism became an integral part of Iranian Islam.”
The other major characteristic of Khurramism is alienation, in particular political which started with their unhappy encounters with Muslim society when Iran was colonized, postrevolutionary violence, ruined lives.
“Everybody else had followed imams of error; only they (the Khurramis) knew that the guardianship of the Prophet’s message had passed to Abu Muslim or Khidash (a Hashimite missionary in Khurasan, who had been repudiated for having adopted the Khurramite heresy already in 737), who had been betrayed and killed by the powers that be. The Muslimiyya would curse the killers and weep over their martyrs, clearly identifying their dire fate with their own. Eventually they enrolled the Persian kings as imams, and so implicitly as martyrs too. The followers of Abdallah b. Mu’awiya were also defined by loyalty to a martyred hero. So too, of course, were many Shi’ites who were not Khurramis and who wept over al-Husayn. In all cases the evil powers were humans, usually the caliph and his supporters, the ‘Arabs’ who called themselves Muslims, and no attempt seems to have been made to retell the story of the evil powers on a cosmic scale, as an account of the creation. In line with this, what the devotees of martyred heroes dreamed about was not escape from the world, but rather vengeance: the hero would come back, or a descendant of his would do so, and he would kill the oppressors, purify the world, and restore the oppressed minority to power.”
As Crone notes (p. 275), like Shi’te extremism, Khurramism was meant to insulate people, “building religious walls around their communities when the mountains no longer sufficed.” The Muslim conquistadors reduced the countryside to urban subservience and imposed their single transcendent God which was intolerable for the mountaineers. Crone (p. 276),
“They opted out in the name of the nearest they could find to their own religion in Islam, meaning Shi’ism stretched to the limits to accomodate their views. They did so as Khurramis, as Qarmatis and other kinds of Ismailis, above all the Nizaris, and eventually as members of all the quasi-Islamic communities that appeared in regions from the Jibal to Anatolia after the Mongol invasions. But it was not until the Safavid conquest of Iran that the mountaineers got their revenge, with consequences that are still with us.”
In her preface, Crone recommends readers to start with chapter 1 which introduces the actors and sets the scene for Khurranism which it dealt with extensively in chapter 2. It’s a good one. As usual, her new text is heavy stuff, not easy to digest. Crone’s dense writing is demanding, and quoting so numerous hardly accessible Arabic, Persian, Pahlavi, Greek, Syriac, Buddhist, Manichaean primary sources, including Middle Iranian texts recovered from Central Asia and Central Asian archaeology is stunning and highly admirable. In chapter 3, Crone tries to systematically examine specific marital patterns and reproductive strategies discernible behind Muslim accusations of ‘wife-sharing’. While in the eastern part of Iran fraternal polyandry was indeed widely practiced, in the west it was temporary co-marriage, somethind which is custom even in present-day Iran (nikah al-mut’ah). Anyway, when and wherever Muslims invaded the former Sasanian empire they brought with them a new marital regime and denounced alternative customes as barbarian and incest, a form of, well, pre-modern Orientalism. What closingly follows is a description of the role of sharing wifes and property in the formation of an ancient communist utopian ideal, namely Mazdakism, in Sasanian Iran.
See Patricia Crone’s lecture on The Acculturated Native Who Rebels: Nativists, Nationalists, and Western-Born Jihadists in Historical Perspective of 24 April 2012 at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton here or click on the video at the bottom.
Notes
[1] The following is about Patricia Crone’s fascinating account on one of the enigmas of Islam, how and why the century-long civilization of Iranians did surrender to Arabs from the desert and how they “Persianized” the new creed which was imposed on them (Crone P. The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012). The book-jacket displays the mirror image of two men riding a camel of a Sogdian mural painting from the 7th century. Russian archaeologists began excavating the ruins of the hill-fort Afrasiyab, northeast of modern Samarqand, in 1880. A small museum at Afrasiyab exhibits Sogdian artifacts including a series of 7th century colorful mural aintings from the royal palace. According to the legend to the picture on the book-Jacket, a gift-bearing procession is shown. The eyes of the man in white garment had later been scratched, while the other man in brown-red displayes an anxious face.
[2] Who are nativists? The rebellion in response to the Arab conquest were, so we are told by Crone (on p. 160ff), not nationalistic. Despite Sasanid “state religion” Zoroastrianism, the rural population in the Jibal, Azerbaijan, Khurasan, Transoxiana kept alive their own religious beliefs and cults, traditions. Prime loyalties, above family level, did not include the king or his high priests or army commanders, but village, tribal chief, and/or religious community.
“Nativism is a different type of reaction to foreign rule. The word usually stands for opposition to immigration and other formes of xenophobia among members of a a hegemonic society, but it is also used of hostility to hegemonic foreigners in societies that have been subjected to colonial rule, and that is the meaning of relevance here. Nativism in this second sense is attested with great frequency in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania in the wake of the European expansion, especially in the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. … “The movements were alway messianic and/or millenarian: the expulsion of the invaders would be followed by paradise on earth, usually inaugurated by a redeemer figure. Because the rebels came from strata that had not enjoyed the supra-local organization that the aristocracy and religious leaders had possessed (if there had been a kingdom in the region) their revolts were often small-scaled uprisings of a local nature. It is on the nativist pattern that the Iranian revolts conform.”
[3] There were earlier, largely unsuccessful, revolts against the Umayyads, well-known those of Husayn ibn Ali in Kerbala in 680 and his grandson Zayd ibn Ali in 739/40 in Kufa, both marking different schisms in Islam, representing the Imami (“Twelver”) Shi’a as regards the former and the Zaidiyyah in case of the latter (there is another major Shi’a branch, Ismailism, after Ismail ibn Jafar, another generation later). The Armenian bishop and historian Sebeos (wr. 661) tells of an even earlier revolt and heavy resistance in the Jibal, former Media, in northwestern Iran, but “thereafter a ghostly silence descends on the Persian plateau” for almost 100 years as Patricia Crone (on p. 6f) describes the fact that, “Like other non-Arabs the Iranians had to enter the Muslim community to acquire visibility,” which takes time.
[4] When I had been invited to join a pilgrimage to Mashhad in Khorasan by Kuwaiti Shi’ites a couple of years ago, we also visited the small village of Miyami on the road to Sarakhs at the border to Turkmenistan with its tiny (almost ruined but now under reconstruction) Emamzadeh Yahiya, built in the 16th century. Imami (“Twelver”) Shi’ites (the branch my Kuwaiti friends belonged to) hold that Yahiya’s father Zayd had apparently accepted not to be the Imam who would succeed his father (in fact, the Imami consider Muhammad al-Baqir, father of celebrated Ja’far as-Sadiq, as fifth Imam); while adherents to the Zaydi branch of Shi’ism (a heresy according to Imami Shi’ites) regard him the righteous fifth Imam. His son Yahiya bin Zayd, though, is believed to have actually been a Zaydi, and he even seemed to have had expressed aspiration for following his father in the Imamate. “It is at this point that the Zaydi sect takes form and its way becomes separate from that of the Shi‘ah Imamiyyah and Ithna Ash‘ari. The followers of the Zaydi sect do not even refer to the infallible Imams,” as can be read at al-islam.org. It was amazing to note the devout visit of the site by these Kuwaiti Twelver Shi’ites.
[5] As Crone explains (p. 22), Mazdakism has its origin in a Zoroastrian heresy which had appeared already in the 3rd century CE, founded by a certain Zardusht, son of Khrosak or Khurrak, a Zoroastrian heresiarch, a contemporary of Mani (d. 277).
“He proposed to remove strife from this world by eliminating desire, not by training people to suppress it, but rather by enabling all to fulfill it in equal: the remedy was equal access to the main sources of conflict, namely women and property, coupled with abstention from harm to any living being. Women and property were to be shared; war was evil; and animals were not to be killed for food. His ideal relating to women were taken up by the emperor Kavadh in the first part of his reign (488-96). Kavadh was expelled, returned, and displayed no signs of heresy thereafter. When he died in 531 a Zoroastrian priest by the name of Mazdak also tried to implement Zardusht’s ideas, this time those relating to the sharing of women and property alike, as the leader of a major revolt in Iraq and western Iran (c. 531-40). It is thanks to his revolt that the heresy came to be known as Mazdakism.”
That great medieval polymath and philosopher Ibn Sina (d. 1037), or Avicenna as he is known in the West, might in fact be regarded as father (or inventor) of medical systematic reviews [1], nowadays considered as the highest level of evidence for efficacy of medical treatments, might be new for some, at least for me, before I’d read an interesting 2007 dissertation of, well, a dentist, Jinan Rashid (in German).
Ibn Sina was born around 980 CE in the village Afshana in the vicinity of Bukhara in Transoxiana. He was the son of a respected scholar of the Ismaili sect from Balkh who took care of his overarching education. Although Shi’ite, his father served as high-ranked official in the Sunnite Samanid Emirate. Considered a child prodigy, Ibn Sina had studied the Holy Qur’an and contemporary classical literature before the age of ten years and had started studies in medicine when 16. He was permitted to use Sultan Nuh ibn Mansur’s vast library in Bukhara for completing his medical studies after he had been counseled, albeit to no avail, the seriously ill Sultan at age 17.
Avicenna’s most important work in the medical realm is of course his five volumes of Al-Qanun fi t-tibb which had been completed around 1020 and which had already been translated into Latin in the 2nd half of the 12th century by Gerhard of Cremona (d. 1187). It was also one of the first books which had been printed in original Arabic after Johannes Gutenberg’s (d. 1468) ground-breaking invention of movable print typing. Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, as it is known in the West, became quickly the standard medical textbook in all European universities until the 16th and 17th centuries [2].
Avicenna’s Qanun mainly collated and elegantly summarized medical knowledge and conceptions of pre-Islamic medicine, i.e. that of Greek Antiquity and late Antiquity. There is hardly any Islamic medicine in it with one notable exception, namely the, as the Prophet Muhammad demanded, frequent use of the miswak, a toothpick made of twigs of the Arabian scrub Salvadora persica, for tooth cleaning. In fact, Avicenna’s views were based on Galen’s (d. ca. 200) humorism about excess or deficiency of the four bodily fluids black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, rather than what has been called the Prophet’s medicine based on traditions according to ahadith.
The Qanun served physicians as leading medical encyclopedia for centuries and, beginning with the 18th century, historic and scientific literature about the Qanun grew exponentially at a rapid pace. The Canon had long been translated into Hebrew, Urdu, and Persian; and in modern times into Russian and Japanese. But it is quite amazing that only parts of the huge work are yet available in English translations. Rashid’s dissertation provides, for the first time, a German translation of certain dentistry-related parts of the Qanun.
That the Qanun contains elaborated paragraphs about dentistry (in particular in volume III, which is dealing with special anatomy and physiology as well as pathology and therapy of diseases of any organ from head to toe, here sections 7 and 8; the latter about oral mucosal and gum diseases was not dealt with in Rashid’s dissertation) might be amazing at first sight; but given Avicenna’s highly systematic and comprehensive approach that should merely be logic and self-evident for the famous polymath. What Avicenna describes, in particular measures for preventing tooth decay, tooth erosion, gum disease, discoloration, or bad breath, sounds both reasonably familiar but sometimes pretty weird, for instance his advice to use a mixture of sugar and honey for polishing teeth before applying, for example essence of roses or other essential oils.
Anyway, did the world-renowned professor and princeps medicorum perhaps practice dentistry himself?
Well, probably not. Rashid’s most revealing part of her interesting dissertation deals with comparative translations of six older than Avicenna’s works [3] in which dental topics had been dealt with, in particular four Arabic authors of the 8th till 10th centuries which have not been quoted by Avicenna [4]. While 75-80% of the texts corresponded with the older works, in many cases literally, Avicenna’s versions seem to be more concise and far more systematical, elegant. For instance, while Hunain provides a similar version of polishing teeth with sugar and honey, he emphasizes mechanical properties; while Avicenna mentions, in addition, different indications according to humorism.
Rashid concludes that Avicenna most likely did not publish his own original work when writing about dental problems. His intention was rather to comprehend contemporary knowledge and put it in order according to philosophical aspects. In a way a systematic review of what was available in the literature which he knew well. The Qanunhad been devised as encyclopedia and reference guide, well, without references [5].
Notes
[1] Avicenna discussed in his major medical work, the Qanun fi t-tibb which is the topic of this post, how to effectively test new medicines based on seven conditions for “The recognition of the strengths of medicines through experimentation”:
The drug must be free from any extraneous accidental quality.
It must be used on a simple, not a composite, disease.
The drug must be tested with two contrary types of diseases, because sometimes a drug cures one disease by its essential qualities and another by its accidental ones.
The quality of the drug must correspond to the strength of the disease. For example, there are some drugs whose heat is less than the coldness of certain diseases, so that they would have no effect on them.
The time of action must be observed, so that essence and accident are not confused.
The effect of the drug must be seen to occur constantly or in many cases, for if this did not happen, it was an accidental effect.
The experimentation must be done with the human body, for testing a drug on a lion or a horse might not prove anything about its effect on man. (Emphasis added.)
Thus, several fundamental criteria for clinical trials were met one thousand years before evidence based medicine (EBM) emerged. I find it particularly intriguing that Avicenna considered animal experimentation as no evidence, something which is still not clear to many scholars in clinical medicine.
[2] Yes, I like mentioning Avicenna when entertaining my students about what is considered a scientific impact nowadays. The Qanun truly made an impact!
[3] Hunain ibn Ishaq (9th century), two books by Abu Bakr ar-Razi (turn of 9th to 10th century), al Magusi (about 975), Abu Sahl al-Masihi (d. 1010) who is considered Ibn Sina’s direct teacher, and one pre-Islamic author, Paul of Aegina (7th century).
[4] Avicenna refers, in the Qanun, only once to Galen; in general, in medieval times authors were not mentioned unless they were criticized. Not mentioning sources is nowadays regarded plagiarism.
[5] Ibn Sina died in 1037 in Hamadan, Iran, probably of cancer. He was only 57 years old.
Two years ago, I had written a brief essay on Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) mystic Night Journey to Jerusalem and then further into Heaven which is commemorated by many Muslims today, 27 Rajab, al-’Isrā’ wal-Mi‘rāj. According to the Holy Qur’an (Q17:1) and aḥādīth the Prophet was taken to the “furthest mosque”, al-masjid al-aqsa,by al-Buraq, the mythical white-winged mare, and ascended to heaven from the Rock on the Temple Mount. The journey took place about one year before the Prophet’s hijra, 621 CE, and he testified afterwards to the Quraysh of Makkah what he had seen in Jerusalem. But what had he actually seen?
Fact of the matter is that during a rather short period of time, between 614 and 629, Christian almost three centuries long control over Jerusalem had been adjourned by Persian rule. In 614 Jerusalem had been besieged for 21 days by the army of Shah Khosrau II’s General Sharbaraz and after the city’s surrender most Christian inhabitants were massacred and all churches destroyed. Even the True Cross was taken as a trophy to the Capital Ctesiphon. But Persian reign lasted only until 629 when the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reconquered the city and returned the True Cross to the rebuilt Holy Sepulchre.
What the Prophet of Islam might have seen when for the first and last time in Jerusalem I had mainly derived from Oleg Grabar’s book on early Islamic Jerusalem, The Shape of the Holy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1996) which provides some computer-generated images of the city around 600 CE, one and a half decade before the Persian conquest. One has to assume that in 621, the year of the mystical Night Journey, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of Resurrection, and the Church on Mt. Zion commemorating the Last Supper and the large Church Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos lay in ruins.
A few decades after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE, around 700 CE, the Umayyad Caliphs Abd’ al-Malik and his son al-Walid erected, in commemoration of Muhammad’s Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock (from where he ascended to Heaven) and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the site of Solomon’s First and post-Babylonian exile Second Temple, and Herod’s reconstruction which had finally been destroyed in 135 CE by the troops of Roman Emperor Hadrian.
Oleg Grabar, who has deceased last year, has co-edited with Benjamin Z. Kedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Where Heaven and Earth Meets: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade (Yad Ben-Zvi Press, Jerusalem and the University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas 2009) which assembles an impressive panel of Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars who present many unknown facts in three thousand years’ history and stunningly illuminate the unique historical, religious, spiritual, cultural, and political importance of this true interface between, focus of, the three monotheistic, revealed, religions (the not less-charged significance for Christians is derived from Jesus’ relation with and acts in Herod’s Temple). The for Jews significant Western Wall of the Esplanade is not forgotten in the account.
Due to the unsolved political situation of Israel occupying East Jerusalem, al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, is seriously endangered. But there is hope. Grabar, in a personal statement concludes:
“There are legal and technical mechanisms for the preservation of what is deemed beautiful and historically significant, but the implementation of these mechanisms requires decisions about governance and responsibility which cannot be exclusively in the hands of political and religious authorities. Alternate possibilities, through UNESCO for instance, have failed so far. But, if one mediates on the eschatological component of the Haram as the space where Go[o]d will be made prevail and man will be judged, one can perhaps imagine that a space shaped by the Antique world long gone and constantly enhanced by the living culture of Islam could become a place for reconciliation and mutual understanding rather than of strife and contest. Hope springs eternal.” (Emphasis added.)
Most of early Meccan surahs are found on the final pages of the Qur’an. They are likely to be missed by Western readers who are only superficially interested in the Muslims’ Holy Book; altogether impossible to properly perceive. Most of the earliest surahs are short and hardly understandable at all; enigmatic, often scary and apparently apocalyptic (e.g., Q100, Q101). Another contains a hymn-like refrain (Q55), possibly evidence for being used in liturgy.
Angelika Neuwirth has long tried to retrieve an assumed close interaction between the messenger and his audience in particular in the forty-three earliest Meccan surahs. Her recent publication (within the series of already published and to be published works produced at Corpus Coranicum, a research project founded in 2007 at the German Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanity), what she calls Handkommentar (“at hand” commentary; similar to existing commentaries of the Old and New Testament), indeed dissects these surahs in order to catch their form as ‘notes of a revelation’ and interprets their basic message against the background of the developing model answer (Erwartungshorizont) of a real audience, i.e., a congregation. It’s a so far unprecedented undertaking (Der Koran – Band I: Frühmekkanische Suren. Verlag der Weltreligionen, Berlin 2011).
It is not just another (meaning superfluous) translation of the Qur’an as was somewhat frivolously feared by Neuwirth’s colleague, Tilman Nagel; but another commentary, after Nöldecke, Paret, Khoury, Bell etc. Neuwirth’s working hypothesis is the primarily open-ended process of the creation of the book. The real corpus of the text is certainly not the canonical one (an arbitrary assemblage of surahs according to their length) but a virtual Corpus, i.e., the sequence of surahs as they had been performed by the Prophet in front of a growing congregation. This concept had actually been introduced 150 years ago in Theodor Nöldecke’s Geschichte des Qorans, but Neuwirth tries to substantially expand it by taking into account not only stylistic but also discursive criteria, i.e., tracing already formulated thoughts in later surahs. This must collide, of course, with faithful Muslims’ view of the “uncreatedness” of the Qur’an.
Traditionally, the short early Meccan surahs represent a small portion of the Qur’an which is still being printed independently and mainly utilized in ritual prayers and meditation. Their often catastrophic, eschatological scenes may help to self-identify with the Prophet’s personal crises known to Muslims from the sira (as certain psalms may allow a personal approach to David for faithful Jews).
The commentary to each surah is structured into five sections. Fortunately, the Arabic text is transcribed into Latin which may easily reveal rhymes and rhyme changes. What follows is a literary critical discussion of structural unity, or possible disruption which might point to a secondary composition; the functionality of rhymes; rhyme schemes according to classic Arabic poetry; discussion of traditions of major schools (Damascus, Kufa, Basrah, Makkah, Madinah) as regards numbering the verses. Questions about composition and structure are followed by cursory commentaries for every verses of the surah put them into a broader perspective of both the assumed time when they were formulated and entire Qur’an itself.
What is notable is Neuwirth’s hypothesis of the messenger’s close interaction with a growing audience, be it his followers in a congregation, or the increasing numbers of enemies apparently addressed, in particular, in newly organized subgroups (by Neuwirth’s colleague Nicolai Sinai) within group I where subtle traces of growing conflicts with pagan Meccans may be identified.
While consolation and praise in group I (a) surahs 93, 94, 97, and 108 strongly recall the language of psalms, in particular eschatological aspects of surahs 99-101 are usually perceived as deeply disturbing and frightening poetry using uncommon, well, never heard participles. This (and others) might in fact be considered as part of the icğaz, the Qur’an’s claimed inimitability, which has been emphasized by German scholar Navid Kermani in his dissertation Gott ist schön (C. H. Beck, Munich 1999). Poetic prophecy, as the subtitle of Neuwirth’s book suggests. The effect here is even enhanced when surahs with a similar topic are read one after another. Neuwirth’s grouping of the surahs is not entirely chronological. Within a subgroup, however, it may be. A few examples. Translations of the Qur’an are generally not considered valid by Muslims. The exact meaning in Arabic can apparently not be caught. See, for example Q 101, Al Qâr’iah (The Calamity).
1-The Striking Calamity.
2-What is the Striking Calamity?
3-And what can make you know what is the Striking Calamity?
4-It is the Day when people will be like moths, dispersed,
5-And the mountains will be like wool, fluffed up.
6-Then as for one whose scales are heavy [with good deeds],
7-He will be in a pleasant life.
8-But as for one whose scales are light,
9-His refuge will be an abyss.
10-And what can make you know what that is?
11-It is a Fire, intensely hot.
The root q-r-c has various meanings (beating, shocking, striking). However, Al Qâr’iah is the feminine, singular participle of the verb, a hardly translatable coinage. In German, nice tries have been Die Klopfende, or Die Pochende.
1-Die Klopfende.
2-Was ist die Klopfende?
3-Weißt Du, was die Klopfende ist?
4-Am Tage, da Menschen sein werden wie auffliegende Motten,
5-da Berge sein werden wie zerflockte Wolle:
6-Wessen Waagschalen dann schwerer wiegen,
7-wird volles Leben haben.
8-Wessen Waagschalen aber leicht wiegen,
9-dessen Zufluchtsort ist der Abgrund.
10-Weißt Du, was ist der Abgrund?
11-Loderndes Feuer!
The novel, highly alarming poetry of the text is obvious. The circumstances under which these verses have first been uttered must have been serious. This is a warning which clearly addresses an audience.
Surah Q 101 follows surah Q 100 (Al-cĀdiyāt) which has inimitably been translated by 19th century German poet Friedrich Rückert (here slightly modified by Angelika Neuwirth to further emphasize expressive and, with units of meaning, changing rhymes):
1-Bei den schnaubend Jagenden,
2-mit Hufschlag Funken Schlagenden,
3-den Morgenangriff Wagenden:
4-die Staub aufwühlen mit dem Tritte
5-und dringen in der Scharen Mitte.
6-Der Mensch ist widerspenstig gegen seinen Herrn
7-und ist sich selbst darüber Zeuge,
8-und heftig liebt er den Gewinn.
9-Weiß er denn nicht: Wenn das im Grab ist aufgeweckt
10-und das im Herzen aufgedeckt,
11-dass nichts vor seinem Herrn dann bleibt versteckt?
The catastrophic event in the beginning is an attack by horses. A similarly ambitious English translation may be found:
1-By the snorting coursers,
2-Striking sparks of fire
3-And scouring to the raid at dawn,
4-Then, therewith, with their trail of dust,
5-Cleaving, as one, the centre (of the foe),
6-Lo! Man is an ingrate unto his Lord
7-And lo! He is a witness unto that;
8-And lo! In the love of wealth he is violent.
9-Knoweth he not that, when the contents of the graves are poured forth
10-And the secrets of the breasts are made known,
11-On that day will their Lord be perfectly informed concerning them.
Under which circumstances have these apocalyptic verses been uttered (just leaving aside what is believed by Muslims) for the first time? Apocalyptic texts, for instance those by Isaiah, Daniel, or the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, had been written at times of deep crisis, in case of the latter shortly before or after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans (or even later, during the time of Emperor Hadrian when, after the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE), even Jewish Christians, who believed that the true Messiah was Jesus Christ, were barred from Jerusalem as were Jews).
What kind of emerging crisis (ecological, social, economical?) can be traced in early Meccan surahs? As far as we know (but what has basically been questioned), 6th century Makkah had been a flourishing urban center of trade and pilgrimage. The (or one) physical center of the cult (or different cults) was the Ka’aba. In Makkah, the messenger’s adversaries were generally pagans, not Jews or Christians. Neuwirth emphasizes the first mentioning of “older scriptures”, those of Abraham (Ibrāhīm), and Moses (Mūsā), e.g. in Q 87:18-19, in group II of her virtual canon, which might be considered both part of the heavenly scripture or inventory book to which the Qur’an apparently belongs, and a record book, diligently documenting the deeds of every human being which will be read on Judgment Day.
Apparently, tensions grew as the messenger is asked by his adversaries, in group III surahs, when Judgment Day will be. Graphic descriptions of Gehenna (jahannam) awaiting the deniers of the message and lovely ones about gardens for the just. Eventually, in group IV surahs lovely-eyed virgins, i.e. houris, hūruncin, are introduced. Q 53 with its polemic directed toward goddesses is said to have contained the infamous, soon removed, Satanic Verses,
19-Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzzá
20-and Manāt, the third, the other?
These are the exalted gharāniq (cranes), whose intercession is hoped for,
a likely concession vis-à-vis pushily inquiring Meccans.
More than one third of the 43 early Meccan surahs, in fact 16, contain additions made later in Madinah, indicating developing content and changing reception, demands and inquiries of the growing congregation. It can be expected that the following four volumes of Neuwirth’s commentary on the Qur’an will address when and under which circumstances the exegetical reading and communication of biblical texts took place. Early Meccan surahs mainly suggest psalms. The same might apply to the Qur’an’s relation to early Arabic poetry.
As Tilman Nagel stresses in his review, the present volume deals with not more than nine per cent of the Holy Book.
