A NEW PERIODIZATION | 55But what truly holds the First Millennium together is the question of Is-
lam’s relation to the deeply rooted cultural traditions that dominated the
world it was born into. It was a precondition of Islam that rabbinic Judaism
and patristic Christianity should have matured (though in Christianity’s case
that also meant fully ventilating its doctrinal inconsistencies and improbabil-
ities) before it appeared; but this does not mean that the First Millennium
falls into two separate, independent halves. It is only the dialogue of continu-
ing Judaism and Christianity—especially continuing Syriac Christianity^17 —
with Qurʾanic, then maturing Islam that generates the potent synthesis we
find in tenth- century Baghdad.
What exactly do I mean by the “maturation” of a tradition?^18 In any tradi-
tion there will be conservatives and progressives. The former will believe
enough has already been said, and maturity attained, even if the founder or
the founding event is still a fresh memory and a potential stimulus to further
development. If we give heavy weighting to the perspective of contempo-
raries, we will find the concept of maturation too controversial to be helpful.
From the historian’s viewpoint, though, a tradition may reasonably be called
mature if it has—first and most fundamentally—acquired a clear sense (or
senses) of what it is and what it is not.^19 Notions of “orthodoxy” and “heresy”
may already be invoked; but that stage may come quite early on. A mature
tradition needs also to have built up enough of its institutions and doctrines
that it seems to correspond to what we perceive, now, to be its broadly char-
acteristic articulation, however self- contradictory. I do not intend any neces-
sary rigidification in the “mature” tradition, but rather its arrival at a point
viewed by a widely influential sector of posterity as paradigmatic, worthy of
imitation (or “classical”).^20 After all, “decline” does not necessarily follow im-
mediately upon maturation. Often we see diversification into channels less
obviously “classical,” but no less vigorous.
17 On the crucial connecting role played by the Syriac world see now Tannous, Syria [1:10].
18 With J. Brown, The canonization of al- Bukhārī and Muslim: The formation and function of the
Sunnī hadīth canon (Leiden 2007) 18–19, I apply the biological term to cultural traditions because each
of these is made up of individual human actors conscious of contributing to its incremental development.
For further reflections on the relationship between intentionality and the use of biological metaphor, see
R. Wisnovsky, “Towards a natural- history model of philosophical change,” in R. Wisnovsky and others
(eds), Vehicles of transmission, translation, and transformation in medieval textual culture (Turnhout 2012)
143–57.
19 For a courageous if controversial attempt to trace the earliest stages of this process in Islam, see
Donner, Muhammad and the believers [1:2].
20 I distinguish popularly received understandings of historical periods or themes from those
advanced by historians, who may be either more or less committed to the prevailing consensus. Those
influenced in choice of subject and interpretation by concerns current in their own society are likely to
face accusations of “teleolog y”—not all of which need to be taken equally seriously: see my comments
below, pages 86–87, 89–90.