Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 47

parent obscurity of the religious issue at stake”!—and assumes it is all just
power games.^115
Given, though, that the two chief movements late Antiquity gave birth
to—Christianity and Islam—were not in their origins economic doctrines,
or primarily indebted to the Greco- Roman world, Liebeschuetz’s “Klassizis-
mus” and the others’ materialism are both alike impediments, in the end, to
grasping why one needs to study the period. One must also add that Giardi-
na’s—and many other historians’—privileging of political and military
events and measurable economic data over cultural climates skews historical
periodization toward the concerns of privileged, landed, documented but
often transient social groupings (whatever the broader structural continu-
ities of the societies in question) to an extent that favors change, or even rup-
ture, over continuity, the short term over the long term.^116 It also—quite
simply—neglects the conceptual dimension of human experience, and so
falls short of providing adequate documentation for the writing of history in
its full sense. By the conceptual dimension of human experience I mean not
just, to quote Björn Wittrock, “ideological epiphenomena,” but

new conceptualizations of the location of human beings in time, [i.e.]

historicity, and of the capacity of human beings to bring about changes

in the world, [i.e.] agency. Such shifts made new forms of institutions

and practices... meaningful and possible, and indeed conceivable.

The “new forms” Wittrock has in mind here are the modern nation- state and
civil society. Just as these, and modernity generally, repose on new ways of
thought, what we call the Enlightenment, rather than just (say) the Indus-
trial Revolution, so too the emergence of the commonwealth of Christian
states, the Papacy, and the community of Islam, the umma, presupposed “a
deep epistemic and cultural shift,” an intellectual and cosmological, not
merely a social, revolution.^117
Not surprisingly, it is to a historian of the Qurʾanic text that we owe the
most substantial contextualization, to date, of Islam in the flow of late Antiq-
uity. The Berlin Corpus Coranicum project was already mentioned at the

115 Wickham, Inheritance [1:26] 329–30.
116 The halting emergence of new ideas about the meaning and disposition of economic wealth is
of course another matter: P. Brown, Through the eye of a needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome, and the making of
Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton 2012). With this “cultural drag” on historical peri-
odization, compare the distinction between “Antiquité tardive “littéraire”” and “Antiquité tardive “histo-
rique”” proposed by R. Martin, “Qu’est- ce que l’antiquité “tardive”?,” in R. Chevallier (ed.), Aiôn (Paris
1976) 261–304. For an extreme example, see M. Heath, “Rhetoric in mid- antiquity,” in T. P. Wiseman
(ed.), Classics in progress (Oxford 2002) 419–39, on Greek rhetorical technique from Homer to Manuel
II Palaeologus (1391–1425), and classifying the fourth- century CE rhetor Libanius as “mid- antique.”
117 B. Wittrock, “The meaning of the Axial Age,” in J. P. Arnason and others (eds), Axial civiliza-
tions and world history (Leiden 2005) 60, 64.