Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

206 | CHAPTER 7 The Brethren of Purity’s fifty- two (or fifty- one) Letters present themselves as the product of circles (majāli ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 207 from the physical world. But this is conceived of in a Muslim context: Islam is the culmination of ...

208 | CHAPTER 7 conventional language of scripture, and considered that the only way to do this was by rational argumentation—wh ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 209 Abū Bishr Mattā (d. 940) or his pupil yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974),^45 appealed to the universality of r ...

210 | CHAPTER 7 to “reason, observation and deduction”; or Theodore’s foreseeable conclu- sion, for all his rationalism, that “t ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 211 about which it was possible to reach consensus (as much as philosophers ever had).^54 To glance bri ...

212 | CHAPTER 7 thought, and a cultural efflorescence, which found few if any rivals outside tenth- to twelfth- century Andalus— ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 213 sized that it is no alternative to the already existing periodizations based on the Arsacid and Sas ...

214 | CHAPTER 7 to Islam within the First Millennium framework, though, will be harder for medievalists to accommodate, given th ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 215 The boundary between the First Millennium and the Middle Ages is espe- cially uncertain in Asia—as ...

216 | CHAPTER 7 Attention to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 served to excuse the title; but East Rome’s cultural and symboli ...

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 217 Mahdīya, the Saracen emporium on the Tunisian coast.^72 Commercial com- petition and holy war were ...

218 | CHAPTER 7 The merchants of Pisa well knew who the worthwhile enemy was, for plunder and trading concessions but also cultu ...

PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH Chapter 1 Comparing the opening chapters of the Cambridge history of Islam (1970) with those of i ...

220 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH and of subsequent Muslim empires down to the Ottomans. He penned a surprisingly positive as ...

PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH | 221 Chapter 3 In developing my argument for the First Millennium, I show how this peri- odizati ...

222 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH The Iranian cultural zone reaches well into Central Asia, and the Sasanians were obliged to ...

PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH | 223 Chapter 6 The Firkovich collections are also one of the main sources of new informa- tion a ...

224 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH clude are largely indebted to a tradition of European and North American research on Islam— ...

Abbasids, 89, 114, 123–24, 153, 214, 221; revive Sasanian Empire, 110, 111; translation movement, 151, 154, 210 ʿAbd al- Malik, ...