78 | CHAPTER 3
to see Islam as entirely self- sufficient. Already Ibn Hishām excised from his
abridged edition whole tracts of Ibn Ishāq’s account of pre- Islamic history,
fostering the illusion of an “empty Hijāz” and contributing to the oblivion of
South Arabia/Himyar’s flourishing urban civilization, from which subse-
quent historical understanding has so deeply suffered.^76 Contextualizing
Islam did not mesh with the growing conviction that it was unique and God-
given and had no need to be related to anything else. Among Ibn Hishām’s
major criteria for deciding whether to keep Ibn Ishāq’s materials was their
direct relevance to the Qurʾān, as he states at the outset of his edition. In the
course of time, Islam came to see its origins as a case of spontaneous genera-
tion. It labeled the pre- Islamic world jāhilīya, “ignorance” or “barbarism” or
“lawlessness” (at least from the religious perspective; pre- Islamic poetry was
another matter^77 ). As early as the Umayyad period, it is true, Muslim scholars
worked out a framework narrative of pre- Islamic prophets and kings. They
even calculated how many years passed between each of its main figures from
Adam to Muhammad^78 —in other words, an incipient “before hijra” chro-
nolog y. But nothing came of it (and bare frameworks of kings and prophets
anyway lacked the attractive texture of Ibn Ishāq’s pre- Islamic narrative). An
early chronographer went so far as to call AH 1 “the first year of history.”^79
Muslims still cannot narrate with any precision what happened before the
hijra except by using BC/AD dates.^80 The insidious concept of jāhilīya re-
mains to this day their answer to “late Antiquity”: two exclusivist doctrines,
two sides of the same coin.^81
Despite Ibn Hishām, and others,^82 there were still for a time Muslims who
dared take a wider view of the past. Notable ninth- century universal histories
include those by yaʿqūbī and Dīnawarī, and culminate with Tabarī’s monu-
mental History of the prophets and kings, completed in the 920s and indebted
to otherwise lost sections of Ibn Ishāq for whole tracts of its account of pre-
76 J. E. Montgomery, “The empty Hijāz,” in id. (ed.), Arabic theolog y, Arabic philosophy (Leuven
2006) 37–97, and I. Gajda, Le royaume de Himyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris 2009), attempt to fill this
void by paying attention to pre- Islamic poetry and epigraphy, respectively.
77 Cf. Neuwirth, Koran als Text [1:6] 332–33.
78 A. el- R. Tayyara, “Prophethood and kingship in early Islamic historical thought,” Der Islam 84
(2008) 1–30.
79 A. Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: L’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers
Abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (Leiden 2011) 32.
80 The conventional Arabic formulae are explicitly Christian: qabla ’l- mīlād, “before the Nativity,”
and baʿda ’l- mīlād/sana mīlādīya, “after the Nativity.” Cf. F. Rosenthal, A history of Muslim historiography
(Leiden 1968^2 ) 90. Even in Europe BC dating caught on slowly, becoming somewhat frequent only in the
late thirteenth century: A.- D. von den Brincken, “Beobachtungen zum Aufkommen der retrospektiven
Inkarnationsära,” Archiv für Diplomatik 25 (1979) 1–20.
81 Neuwirth, Koran als Text [1:6] 39–42.
82 See, e.g., T. Khalidi, Arabic historical thought in the classical period (Cambridge 1994) 48, on the
ninth- century historian Wāqidī.