42 | CHAPTER 2
Although, for Brown, the rise of Islam was undeniably a crisis, it was a
crisis in the religious history of late Antiquity not of some alien world, and it
started in Mecca, which was linked to commercial and cultural centers in the
Iranian- Roman sphere to the north. The Qurʾān alluded to both Judaism
and Christianity as practiced in Syria and Mesopotamia. And although the
Arabs’ military and political successes turned inside out the old order cen-
tered on Ctesiphon and Constantinople, there was a substantial cultural
continuity, still to this day visible in the Umayyad monuments of Greater
Syria. Where Rome both Greek and Latin underwent deep transformations
under the impact—however gradual in the West—of German and Arab con-
quests, the new Islamic empire preserved at least the late antique forms, Ira-
nian as well as Roman. Indeed, the Iranian world got the upper hand after
the Abbasid revolution that expelled the Umayyads in 750.
Besides its narrative text, The world of late Antiquity is also a visual feast.
The last photograph of all shows figural carving from the Umayyad palace at
Khirbat al- Mafjar, closely related in both space and time to Mushattā. The
caption speaks of “this revival of Persian tastes and artistic traditions... that
smothered the Late Antique forms of representational art.” The adjacent,
concluding pages of text dilate on the triumph of the Persianized Abbasids:
Thus, in the end, it was the traditions of Khusro I Anoshirwan which
won over those of Justinian I.... And, in Persian hands, the eternal lure
of Further Asia reasserted itself.... Just before he was crowned Roman
emperor of the West in 800, Charlemagne received from Harun al-
Rashid a great cloak and a pet elephant called Abul Abaz. Little did the
Frankish monarch know it, but in this gift the calif had merely repeated
the time- honoured gesture of Khusro I Anoshirwan when, at the great
Spring festival, the king of kings had lavished gifts of animals and cast-
off clothing on his humble servants.^96
Now Peter Brown, like Marrou and many others, is no admirer of Strzy-
gowski, having deplored his “erratic and, to a modern reader, highly un-
pleasant tone,”^97 and pointedly excluded him (but not Riegl or—see below—
Rostovtzeff ) from a list of scholars who excelled where Strzygowski had
shown the way, in the analysis of nonelite late antique culture.^98 Nonetheless,
beyond certain similarities of style between two men both eager to offend
the Establishment and replace traditional Romanocentricities with astonish-
trasts,” in B. D. Metcalf (ed.), Moral conduct and authority: The place of adab in South Asian Islam (Berke-
ley 1984) 23–37, confines itself to reflecting on moral authority and deportment among educated men
and monks in late Antiquity, and the Muslim elites.
96 Brown, World of late Antiquity [2:95] 200, 202, 203.
97 P. Brown, Art bulletin 77 (1995) 500, on T. F. Mathews, The clash of gods (Princeton 1993).
98 P. Brown, “Images as a substitute for writing,” in E. Chrysos and I. Wood (eds), East and West:
Modes of communication (Leiden 1999) 16.