The Origins of Islam was in this sacred place someone—they give him the name of Abbas—who
sprang from the Ishmaelite root, but was not banished from the house of
Abraham in the manner of his forefather, but shared with Isaac in his paternal
inheritance, or rather seized the very kingdom of Heaven itself ’’ (, ). The
slight hesitation at the end of the passage was of course wholly justified. For
to share with Isaac the patrimony of Abraham now meant, in Sozomenus’
conception, the adoption of an extreme form of Christian asceticism.
This paper cannot pretend to tackle the complex question of competing
religious and cultural influences in the Roman provincial area and the Hedjaz
in the period of over a century and a half between the composition of Sozo-
menus’EcclesiasticalHistoryand of Theodoret’sPhilotheosHistoriaand the earli-
est preaching of Islam. Suffice to note that there is suggestive, if uncertain,
new archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the Negev which seems
to date to this period and to suggest the existence there of a monotheistic
cult with an emphasis on Abraham.^74 All that is offered here is an analysis of
how fluid the patterns of allusion to ‘‘Ishmaelites,’’ ‘‘Arabs,’’ and ‘‘Saracens’’ in
Jewish and Christian writings were; equally, how these were influenced by
the Greek ethnographic tradition of identifying contemporary ‘‘peoples’’ in
terms of their descent from mythical ‘‘founders’’ or ‘‘forefathers’’; and how
central a place in the construction of a genealogical and religious connec-
tion between Jews and Arabs was occupied by Josephus. We cannot, it is true,
be certain whether Josephus’ identification of Arabs as the descendants of
Hagar and Ishmael was original to himself, or whether he was the first to
attribute the Arab practice of circumcision to their descent from Abraham.
But no other Jewish writer known to us presented this view so consistently,
or was so influential in later Christian thinking. Because of that influence, it
is suggested here, he had an important posthumous role in the formation of
Islam. It was not to be expected that Josephus could ever have occupied the
honoured place given in the Koran to a succession of figures from both the
Old and the New Testaments, including Mary and Jesus. But none the less
it was the pattern of the very clear ethnographic choices which he made in
retelling biblical history which was later to offer Christians the possibility of
holding out to the ‘‘Saracens’’—or ‘‘Ishmaelites’’—of the desert a particular
claim to share with them in the true inheritance of Abraham.
. See Y. D. Nevo and J. Koren, ‘‘The Origins of the Muslim Descriptions of the Jāhilī
Meccan Sanctuary,’’JNES (): , esp. ff. I am very grateful to Jeremy Johns for this
reference, and to Martin Goodman both for the opportunity to present these arguments
at a seminar in Oxford in autumn and for a very helpful critical reading of the paper.