Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 19

times, particularly about issues of social, cultural, and political identity. This
is certainly true of the problems I touched on in chapter 1: the difficulty of
fitting the Islamic world into the conventional North Atlantic narrative of
history ancient, medieval, and modern, and the more specific issues of how
Islam relates to late Antiquity, and when late Antiquity ends. Recent inten-
sive discussion of all this reflects the widespread uncertainty about whether
to include Islam in our contemporary worldview, or go on excluding it.
Now is not the first time historians of later Antiquity have been faced
with a more or less political choice between inclusive and exclusive under-
standings of what they study and teach. In the past, it was usually Christian-
ity that provided the stumbling block, whether to Gibbon in Enlightenment
England or educationalists in nineteenth- century Greece uncertain about
what role to allot Christian Rome or “Byzantium” alongside the ancient
Greeks.^1 In the Italy of the 1930s the young Arnaldo Momigliano felt called
upon to assert that

no fully self- aware historian of the ancient world, that is, no person

conscious of the fact of living in a civilization of Christian origin, can

get away with the refusal to recognize that ancient history makes sense

only when it is seen to evolve in such a way as to end naturally in the

rise of Christianity.^2

And indeed we can find Fergus Millar even today asking ancient historians,

Why do we exclude from the standard conception of what a classical

education is about Jewish and Christian texts in Greek, and Christian

texts in Latin?

Millar also makes the daring suggestion that

we might even read in Greek classes those vivid views of provincial so-
ciety in the Roman Empire provided by the Gospels and Acts.^3
Millar accompanies this opening to Jewish and Christian Antiquity with
a firm exclusion of Islam.^4 My concern here is to argue that it is now Islam’s
turn to be seen as Antiquity’s “natural end,” albeit thanks to the drift of the

1 Cf. C. Mango, Byzantium and its image (London 1984) III.53–55; C. Koulouri, Dimensions
idéologiques de l’historicité en Grèce (1834–1914) (Frankfurt 1991) 319–28, 335–42, 491–96; A. Politis,
“From Christian Roman emperors to the glorious Greek ancestors,” in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds),
Byzantium and the modern Greek identity (Aldershot 1998) 1–14 (my thanks to Christina Angelidi for
this last reference).
2 A. Momigliano, Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome 1979) 186–87, quoted by P.
Brown, “Arnaldo Dante Momigliano,” Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988) 408.
3 F. Millar (ed. H. M. Cotton and G. M. Rogers), Rome, the Greek world, and the East (Chapel Hill
2002–6) 1.34; cf. 3.505–8.
4 Millar, Rome, the Greek world, and the East [2:3] 3.489, 506.