Prefatory Note and Acknowledgments
Before and after Muhammad develops my attempt in Empire to common-
wealth (1993) to view Arsacid and Sasanid Iran, Rome, and the Caliphate
within a single frame. Since then I have approached the early Caliphate by
way of its material culture in Qusayr ʿAmra (2004), and through philosophy
(especially the Arabic Plotinus) in an uncompleted book titled Rational
Islam and the reinvention of Aristotle. Except in its definition of the geo-
graphical framework, Before and after Muhammad barely overlaps with Em-
pire to commonwealth; but it has been much fertilized by Rational Islam. It
lays out, and in its last two chapters somewhat schematically exemplifies, a
new historical periodization, whose practical demonstration will be pro-
vided, in due course, by a large- scale narrative to be titled The First Millen-
nium: From Augustus to Avicenna.
Unless specified otherwise, all dates are CE, and translations listed in the
notes are into English. There is no bibliography. All references are given in
full at their first occurrence and in abbreviated form thereafter, with their first
occurrence indicated in square brackets by chapter and footnote number
separated by a colon (e.g., [2:32]). The chapter 2 epigraph excerpt is reprinted
by permission of the publisher from Interpreting late Antiquity: Essays on the
postclassical world, edited by G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar,
p. ix: Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Copyright © 1999, 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The chapter 5 first epigraph excerpt is from Sebastian Brock’s article “From
antagonism to assimilation: Syriac attitudes to Greek learning”, © 1982,
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Trustees for Harvard
University. Originally published in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in
the formative period, edited by Nina G. Garsoïan, Thomas F. Mathews, and
Robert W. Thomson.
I would like to thank Johann Arnason for his early interest in and encour-
agement of my First Millennium project, and Glenn Most for inviting me to
give three lectures, titled “Beyond late Antiquity,” at the Scuola Normale Su-
periore, Pisa, in April 2009. Rob Tempio, of Princeton University Press, sug-
gested I turn these into a short book. I wrote a first draft during three intense
weeks of August 2009 at Katounia, Limni, in the pine woods by the Euboean
Gulf, where forty years earlier Dimitri Obolensky composed The Byzantine
Commonwealth (1971), and Philip Sherrard worked until his untimely death
in 1995. I am grateful to Denise Sherrard for her ever- generous hospitality.