Ahab Bdaiwi איהאבּ ܐܝܗܐܒ
@abhistoria
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Early Islam & Late Antiquity| Medieval Philosophy & Theology| Medieval Shiʿism| Manuscripts| Assistant Professor in Islamic Thought and History @UniLeidenNews
Leiden/London
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A PDF of the article for those who couldn’t access the journal.
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The Satanic Verses controversy has a long and recent past. The incident reached global fame after the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel. Long before, however, the topic was fiercely debate in medieval Muslim scholarship. A general 🧵 for non-specialists. 1/
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In light of the stunningly beautiful images of the Webb telescope, a thread on medieval Muslim accounts of the heavens. 1/
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The “annoying” fly appears in medieval Arabic literature. When caliphs and kings found the tiny creature irritating they asked wisemen why God created the tiny annoying fly, the wise would respond: ‘To humiliate tyrants’
#flygate
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Are we alone? Does life exist elsewhere in our universe? Some responses from medieval Muslim authorities. A short thread. 1/
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Mary and Jesus depicted in late 16th century Indian Islamic manuscript.
#MerryChristmas2021
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Tens of hidden Syriac manuscripts recovered after the arrest of ISIS terrorist in Nineveh. The MSS belonged to the Churches of Mosul ܫܘܒܚܐ ܠܐܠܗܐ
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Good morning. The subject matter here is 16 lines only. The rest is marginal notes.
#ArabicManuscripts
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As an academic I have spent years studying, teaching, and writing on Islamic theology, doctrine, history, and other religions disciplines in Islam. My opinion should count when I say, al-Baghdadi was not a scholar by any stretch of the imagination. Obituary in the
@washingtonpost
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Long before Christoph Luxenberg, medieval Muslim authorities compiled lists of foreign vocabularies in the Quran. The Quran contains words from Ethiopian, Persian, Indian, Turkic, Nabatean, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Greek, and Berber, and Abyssinian origin. A thread. 1/
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The best Arabic bookstore I’ve ever been to—by far. Birmingham, UK.
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I want to hear analysis about Afghanistan from Afghan academics, specialists, community and religious leaders, and journalists. A certain cadre of western journalists and think-tank opportunists should preserve the little dignity they have left and step aside.
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Mary and Jesus depicted in late 16th century Indian-Iranian Islamic manuscript.
#MerryChristmas2022
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1/Millions of Shiʿi Muslims around the world will be celebrating what they consider the appointment and designation of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib as the legitimate successor to the Prophet Muḥammad. A short thread on
#EidGhadir
.
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A thousand different styles of the Arabic negative existential indicative لا showing 1400 years of development (according to Iraqi artist Bahiyah Shihab)
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The handwriting of a 37 year old Ibn Sina (Avicenna). It reads, “[this] has fallen in the possession of the wretched, Husayn son of Abd Allah son of Sina, the physician-student, in the year 407 (1017 CE).” Courtesy of MM.
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1/The image depicts Socrates in pensive meditation attended by his students. The portrayal of Socrates in Arabic literature as the archetypal human dates to the early periods of Islam. Who was the Arabic Socrates? A 🧵🧵🧵
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For a full treatment with excruciating details, consult the brilliant work (which I summarised above) of the late Shahab Ahmed. FIN.

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The purveyors of Islamophobia come in different hues. Maher epitomises the most stupid. Claims that Western civilisation gave us everything good is a silly canard. Europe is indebted to Islamic civilisation in many ways. Let’s start with astronomy (other sciences later) 🧵 1/
The world would be a much better place if it had more “outposts" like Israel.
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I dislike modern prints. I still prefer to read the manuscript of a work even if there’s a critical edition.
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The Satanic Verses incident is known as the Story of the Cranes (قصة الغرانيق) in the Islamic tradition. It narrates the occasion when the Prophet Muhammad (died 632 CE) mistook the whispers of Satan for divine revelation. 2/
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Addendum: please excuse all the typos and infelicities. I did the thread on my phone and in a hurry.
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Did the Prophet Muḥammad follow an Arabian religion or religiosity before Islam, that is, before what Muslim accounts label the "Call to Prophecy"? A short thread based on notes for an article preparation 1/
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The copyist decided to turn marginal notes into art.
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Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 661 CE) on Jesus son of Mary: “If you like, I will tell you about Jesus the son of Mary…”
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Let’s take a more detailed look at the historicity of the incident. But first, it is worth mentioning that all Muslim group and sects today vehemently reject the Satanic Verses incident on both theological and historical grounds. 4/
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The satanic intrusions led Muhammad to utter verses in praise of the pagan idols of seventh century Mecca leading him to recognise their powers of intercession with God. 3/
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Medieval Arabic copyists used three dots (الاثافي) to symbolise “copied just as” when they encountered words with non-standard spelling or erroneous meaning. It’s the Arabic equivalent of the Latin “sic” (sic erat scriptum).
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A letter from the residents of Medina sent to the people of Iraq in 1925 urging them to help the locals fight off the Wahhabi attack and demolitions of the local tombs and sanctuaries of revered historical Muslim personalities.
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Bizarre really how a seemingly innocuous cultural and religious clothing can unleash the racists. Whether the hijab or the bisht, it seems any clothing that signifies Muslimness is shown animus and treated with suspicious.
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We have at least 50 historical reports from the first 200 years of Islam (roughly 610-810 CE) that describe in detail the occasion when the Prophet Muhammad supposedly mistook the deception of Satan for the command of God, thereby altering the message of the Quran. 7/
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Among medieval Muslim scholarly elites there was a group of bibliomanes, bibliophiles, and avid admirers of ancient ideas and languages. A thread on a tenth century Muslim account of ancient-medieval scripts and languages.
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1/Next month I start my fellowship at Cambridge University. The project is about the quranic "pagans," picking up where Patricia Crone left off. In the main I will investigate the religion and philosophical worldview of the "pagans" or mushrikūn of the Quran. A background thread.
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What does it mean to say the Satanic Verses incident appears in the Islamic tradition? It means the Muslim historical sources that collect, carry, and preserve the cultural memories of the first Muslim community have recorded and reported the Satan Verses incident. 6/
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Advice to students of knowledge found in 15th century Syriac & Arabic manuscript:
“O seeker of knowledge! Apply yourself to piety; forgo sleep and subdue satiety; persist in knowledge-seeking and abandon it not; for knowledge thrives and grows lofty through constant study.”
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Medieval Muslim historian Ibn Wahshiyyah (9th C) is said to be one of the first to decipher ancient alphabets, including Egyptian hieroglyphs. His book, Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham, was available long before Jean-François Champollion, 19th C decipher of Egyptian hieroglyphs
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A pictorial thread on horses in medieval Arabic manuscripts. First diagram offers a fairly detailed anatomy of horse (MS Arabe 2817 Bibliothèque nationale de France) 1/
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Reports coming in that militias/Asad loyalists have exhumed the tomb of Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-̵ʿAzīz (r. 717-720 AD). This is nothing short of brazen sectarian violence. As always, extremists of all stripes miss the point of historical memory 1/8
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Probably the earliest extant Hummus recipe dating back to 14th century AD in cookbook written in Cairo: a cold purée of chickpeas with vinegar and pickled lemons with herbs, spices, and oil
#hummus
#arabicfood
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Similarly, a number of academic specialists of Islam think the incident is the result of the literary invention of very early Muslim biographers and historians (for reasons I’ll explain below). 5/
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A forthcoming study on an unpublished Vienna papyri will undoubtedly change how we think about early Islamic piety and zuhd. The study examines and edits a papyri dating back to the 700s AD, significantly earlier than the literary and hadith corpora we have. 1/
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Some happy news. I have been offered the Cook-Crone Fellowship at Cambridge University
@Cambridge_Uni
for my project “Echoes of Antiquity in Early Islam.” It’s quite an honour to follow in the footsteps of the late Patricia Crone, continuing her project on the Quranic Mushrikun
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Possibly the oldest extant copy of Ghazali’s Tahafut copied in 1113 AD, two years after the author’s death. It was the personal copy of the Ashari theologian Jurjani (d. 1413).
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Militant atheism is not and never was neutral. It is as John Gray notes a repressed religiosity of some kind—or better still, a Christian heresy. Dawkins appositely shows that new atheism is yet another expression of Islamophobia masquerading as secular liberalism.
"If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I'd choose Christianity every single time."
Self-proclaimed 'cultural Christian', ＠RichardDawkins, tells
@RachelSJohnson
he's 'slightly horrified' to hear Ramadan lights were hung on Oxford Street rather than Easter lights.
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A lovely painting. A short thread on Avicenna and wine drinking. One: Avicenna drank wine. His penchant for wine drew many condemnations from hard-nosed jurists and theologians alike, and drew the admirations of modern orientalists, of course. 1/
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A thread on Aqa Bozorg Tehrani (d. 1970), the inimitable bio-bibliographer who penned over 55,000 entries, 15,000 pages on Shii authors, list of extant & lost manuscripts around the world, in sciences, theology, philosophy, history, linguistics, hadith, Quran, etc. 1/
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The narration here is recorded in one of the earliest and most authoritative biographies of Muhammad, by a certain Ibn Ishaq who died in 767 CE. The full text is available in English translation. 9/
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The oldest complete copy of Sahih al-Bukhari copied by the Spanish litterateur Muhammad b. Yusuf b. Sa’adah in 550 AH/1155 CE, based on the narration of Abu Dharr al-Harawi (d. 434/1043)
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Tomorrow Pope Francis will travel to the Iraqi city of Najaf to meet Ayatullah ʿAlī al-Sīstānī, the primus inter pares of the Shiʿi Muslim scholars, and the Rector of the Seminary of Najaf, founded in 1055 AD. A thread on the millennium-old seminary. 1/
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1/The new religious movement brought by the Prophet Muḥammad was not always called Islam. Over the course of Muḥammad public preaching in the 23 year period, we can detect more than a few appellations and designations
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Brilliant thread. I’d also add that the ISIS flag is not only a 19th century forgery, but the Arabic word “God-Messenger-Muhammad” is diametrically opposed to the order, “Muhammad-Messenger-God” found typically in Arabic numismatics, as the diagram shows.
The design of the ISIS flag can be traced back to shady Orientalists in the 1850's...
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Medieval Muslim sources speak of a Jewish sect that believed in the prophethood of Muḥammad. Who were they? A mini-thread 🧵🧵 1/
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“The tongue of the wise man is behind his heart, and the heart of a fool is behind his tongue.” A rare copy of the Nahj al-Balaghah of the sermons and sayings attributed to Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 661). Copy likely dates to late 12th century/early 13th century AD.
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Described in popular & academic writings as ‘scientific academy, institution of knowledge, premodern centre of learning, or univ-library,’ the House of Wisdom (بيت الحكمة) in medieval Baghdad is a fine example of modern fanciful imaginations back-projected into history. A 🧵1/
The Library of Alexandria isn't the only library lost to time.
There was also the "House of Wisdom", built 1,000 years ago in Baghdad when it was the world's largest city.
What did it contain? What happened to it? This is the story of history's other great library...
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Nineteenth century copy of astronomy work (تشريح الأفلاك) of Baha’ al-Din al-‘Amili (d. 1621), Safavid-era polymath
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In summary: the Satanic Verses story appears in the earliest historical sources of Islam. It is rejected by others. Critics deem it a literary invention to imbue Muhammad with virtue, which received little if any supper by later orthodoxies. 39/
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The Satanic Verses incident was not included in any of the canonical Hadith collections. They deemed it inauthentic and incongruent with their theological project (which required the Prophet to be infallible). 31/
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These 50 or so reports are known as narrations (or رواية in Arabic). The should be understood as historical memories that follow specific style and hermeneutic in literary narrative. Let’s take a look at one example from the 50 narrations. 8/
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Fifteenth century colourful Qur’an with interlinear annotations and Persian translations of Arabic text as well as marginal grammatical notes to help readers. Produced circa 1400s AD in Timurid Iran. 7 different colours used throughout the entire Qur’an.
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1/In 1883 French historian Ernest Renanat Sorbonne, claiming that Muslims are inherently incapable of doing philosophy, that science is foreign to Arabs & Islam. Living in Paris at the time, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani responded, publishing his open letter in the Journal des débats
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Later Muslims dismissed the incident as spurious and theological abominable based on two considerations: one, Muhammad was a protected by God. He was, in their view, infallible and not prone to make mistakes in his delivery of the revelation. 21/
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Manuscripts are windows into the past. They carry knowledge and tradition, and offer us insights into medieval scribal habits, religious thought, and the history of ideas. A short visual of my work with Arabic manuscripts.
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It is true that in medieval Muslim societies coffee was much more than a brewed drink intended to embellish social gatherings & soirées. In Muslims societies, coffee found expression in legal writings, piqued the curiosity of poets, & inspired mystics.
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Reports of the Satanic Verses incident were recorded by virtually every biographer of Muhammad in the first two centuries of Islam: ‘Urwah b. al-Zubayr, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, Musa b. ‘Uqbah, Ibn Ishaq, Abu Mash‘ar, Yunus b. Bukayr , and al-Waqidi. 15/
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The narration is quite long but a close reading shows the following discernible narrative units and motifs. The first motif: Muhammad was distressed and under pressure from his local tribe. Satan exploited the situation by feeding him false revelation. 10/
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1/ “The learned lives, although he dies.” Thread on ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. The 19 & 21 of Ramadan holds special significance for Shiʿi Muslims, marking the death of ʿAlī in 661 AD. For Shiʿis, ʿAlī is the pole of spirituality, normative voice of morality, & fountainhead of learning
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This charlatan graduated from Leiden university. As a Leiden professor I am embarrassed of her. She besmirches the good name of Leiden. As an Islamic studies scholar I find her claim hilariously bad—you’d have to be stupid in great multiples to believe her. She lies.
Taqiyya is an Islamist concept that translates to fool the infidel. Lie, dissemble, pretend to go along. Whatever it takes to make the Infidel lower his guard. There are lots of useful idiots demonstrating in DC with Hamas today. Truly fooled.
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The Garden of Martyrs (روضة الشهداء) is perhaps the most popular modern account of the tragedy of Karbala and the death of Husayn b. 'Ali on Ashura in 680 CE. Composed in 1502-03, its author, Husayn Va’iz Kashifi was a Persian Hanafi Sunni who belonged to the Naqshabani Order. 1/
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Almost every single post here is either inaccurate, patently false, or even worse completely made up. This account is shoddy and has repeatedly refused to pay heed to feedback from specialists and scholars in the field.
Did you know the Arabic language has an “abjad” system and not an alphabet?
The Arabic abjad is made up of 28 letters, written from right to left. All of the letters are consonants, since the vowels in Arabic are denoted by diacritics.
A thread on Arabic letters & language…
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The third motif: Muhammad is reproached by the Archangel Gabriel who is the one that usually brings him revelation from God. Gabriel rebukes Muhammad, telling him ‘what have you done! This isn’t God’s revelation’. 12/
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I just heard Professor Wilferd Madelung has passed away. Professor Madelung was beyond a shadow of a doubt the most erudite scholar of academic Islamic studies in the last century or so. His versatility in history, theology, philosophy, philology, and manuscripts is unsurpassed.
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In another tradition, Muhammad al-Baqir (died 733 CE) is asked if we are alone in the universe. He responds that God created a million other worlds and a million other Adams. FIN.
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The fourth motif: God forgives the grieving Muhammad and reminds him that previous prophets have fallen into similar traps set up for them by Satan.13/
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On this day, 19 December, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali passed away in 1111 CE.. He was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant, versatile, and controversial thinkers of medieval Islam. Here’s a series of threads on him. 1/
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#Ashura
is an occasion filled with poignant memories of sacrifice and redemption. On this day Husayn b. Ali, grandson of Prophet Muhammad was killed along with his family and companions. His death sent shockwaves across the Muslim world. A 🧵 of non-Muslims views of Husayn 1/
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I’ve been cataloguing a gem of a library in London (al-Khoei Library) that houses close to 20,000 Arabic volumes. It’s a huge task but a delightful way to spend the summer days when taking a break from research. A thread of videos and pictures. 1/
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The second motif: Muhammad joined the pagan Arabs in venerating of their idols, named Lat, Uzza, and Manat. The pagans rejoiced and took great delight that Muhammad and his Muslim followers afforded their pagan religion some respect. 11/
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This leads us to the next important question: why was embarrassing incident accepted as true? To understand the reasons behind their early Muslim acceptance of the Satanic Verses we need to understand why later Muslims rejected it. 20/
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Major announcement: Sean Anthony (
@shahanSean
) and I will be co-translating to English the newly-published and recently-discovered The Expeditions (المغازي) of Mūsā b. ʿUqbah b. Abī ʿAyyāsh (d. 141/758), the oldest extant biography of the Prophet Muḥammad. Wish us luck.
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Jaʿfar al-Sadiq (died 765 CE) is reported to have said: "There are seven heavens. Each contains life...and there are seven earths; five of which contains life". 2/
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1/17 Short thread on Sunnism. A common mistake made by non-specialists would have us believe that the events following the death of Muḥammad in 632 AD precipitated the Shiʿi-Sunni divide. This is quite wrong. The demarcation of sectarian identities was brought into sharp
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A study of the transmission history of the incident shows it was widely circulated and reported in first two hundred years of Islam in almost every important intellectual centre in the Islamic world from the Hijaz to Syria to Iraq to Transoxania to North Africa. 18/
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The Sirah is thus a deliberate attempt to portray a struggling and humanised Muhammad that goes on to rise against life’s vicissitudes to make monotheism triumph supreme. 37/
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1/The author,
@Ed_Husain
, made a string of errors and specious arguments in this piece. The analysis of medieval Islamic history and philosophy on display is not only outdated, but quite amateurish. A quick thread and list of errata
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Earliest extant transcription that mentions the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632 AD) by name is found in a note dating back to 637 AD, located in a Syriac manuscript. The orthography is interesting. Muhammad is spelled ܡܘܚܡܕ not ܡܚܡܛ as is commonly believed (image from Anthony & Penn)
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Ramaḍān رمضان (“scorching” month), from رمض Ramḍ (“scorchedness”).
Similarly, in Hebrew, Remeṣ רֶמֶץ (“ember” or “burning coal”
Likewise, in Syriac Rmū’ā ܪܡܘܥܐ (“hot ash”)
#RamadanKarim
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Two medieval Arabic works on dogs. First, by al-Suyuti, list sixty different names for dogs. Second, by Ibn al-Marzuban, on the superiority of dogs over many humans.
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That is, the earliest historical accounts of Islam and the life of Muhammad break into 3 different and often disagreeing methods of preserving history. The 3 discourses are called Hadith, Sirah, and Tafsir. 24/
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All the major cities of the Islamic world knew of the incident—and accepted it a true—in places like Medina, Mecca, Basra, Kufa, Baghdad, Rayy, Balkh, Samarqand, Marw, Sanaa, Fustat, and Qayrawan. 19/
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Letter of Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi to the people of Mecca describing the sanctity of city. Sent circa 762 CE. Manuscript held at Cambridge University Library (Qq.44).
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This begs the question, though. Why did the early Muslim transmit such a story if it was indeed a literary invention of fecund imagination? Here we need to understand that early Islamic memory (including the life of Muhammad) was preserved by 3 distinct discourses. 23/
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Two, the historical reliability of the early transmitters of the Satanic Verses incident is dubious and rely on spurious historical information. The first rejection relies on theological doctrine called Infallibility of Prophet while the second is based on Hadith Criticism. 22/
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The Satanic Verses incident is reported in the genre of writing history that falls under Sirah and Tafsir. The former genre describes the biography and life of Muhammad, while the latter is exegesis or commentary of the Qur’an. 25/
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Oldest known manuscript of al-Shāfiʿī's (d. 820) al-Risālah (الرسالة في أصول الفقه), groundbreaking work in medieval Islamic legalism, copied in 878 AD in the hand of his trusted student & amanuensis al-Murādī (d. 884), making it one of the oldest, extant Arabic (non-quranic) MSS
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What is love? In a symposium apparently taking place in eight-century AD Iraq a bunch of Muslim intellectuals and Greek sages get together to define “love”. A summary & loose translation thread of their views
#ValentinesDay
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Long gone the days of parochial Islamic studies. A tentative table of contents of the Oxford Handbook of Shiʿi Islam edited by myself and Sajjad Rizvi (
@mullasadra
), 45 chapters and nearly 500,000 words!
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The Satanic Verses incident was invented, the claim goes, by the Sirah scholars in order to tell a heroic story of peril, suffering, fortitude, persistence, faith, courage, and triumph. 38/
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1/What is the nature of the Qur’an? Was it created in time? Or has it always been (قديم)? A thread on how medieval Muslim thinkers, theologians, philosophers, and jurists understood the nature of the Muslim sacred scripture 🧵🧵🧵
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