86 | CHAPTER 3
grounds of research convenience, not theological and providential arrière-
pensée. In chapter 4 I will make some further comments about how the im-
perial regimes of Iran, Rome, and the Caliphate also fit into this framework.
But since one way of making our analysis more convincing is by varying our
vantage points, while periodizations that repose like an arch on a fixed sup-
port at each terminus offer irresistible provocation to the literal- minded
(“Why Augustus/Jesus?”, “Why Ibn Sīnā?”), I have also noted another ap-
proach. Starting as it were from the arch’s keystone, that is to say from some
pivotal event, from which one reads both backward and forward until one
has sufficiently illuminated its causes and consequences, one may construct
one’s periodization around that focus rather than between a start and a fin-
ish.^105 The pivot here proposed is already announced in the book’s title: Be-
fore and after Muhammad. This could have been interpreted narrowly, the
“before” being the religious and political turmoil of sixth- century Arabia,
the “after” in terms of the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire in the century
following Muhammad’s death. But I have chosen to take a wider view, mak-
ing Muhammad stand for a whole religious culture in dialogue with others
from its inception, then maturing and in due course exercising its own gravi-
tational pull. There is, in other words, much to be gained from using both
arch and pivot together.^106 One of the most rewarding things about the re-
sulting First Millennium periodization is its appropriateness to the study of
philosophy and law as well as the monotheist religions from which its initial
definition is derived.
A further objection to the First Millennium, particularly as a field of study
partly designed to illuminate our contemporary clash of civilizations, is that
it seems perilously teleological. Here we must acknowledge that there is both
appropriate and inappropriate teleolog y. Viewing, for instance, Constantine
primarily as the founder of Western civilization is inappropriate teleolog y
because he also stood at the dawn of East Rome or “Byzantium,” which was
often in conflict with Latin Christendom; while the relationship between
monotheism and monarchy he grappled with was likewise to be fundamental
to the Islamic world, which was directly continuous and contiguous with
East Rome, and at different times in conflict with both Eastern and Western
Christendom. Nobody today could deny that the rise of Christianity and
that of Islam are the fundamental events of the First Millennium, with cru-
cial impact on our own era. The First Millennium can reasonably therefore
be treated not just in its own right, but also as a prime source of (but not
leading inevitably to) the present conjuncture.
105 Osterhammel, Verwandlung [2:94] 99.
106 Those who dislike supposedly Christianocentric periodizations might be expected to be aller-
gic to Islamocentric ones too; but in practice this is not always the case, Islam being—apparently—less of
a threat to the intelligentsia, for the time being, than Christianity.