Dominant modern historiography envisions late antiquity as exclusively
in the so-called Western tradition. Modern European thought traces itself
through the appropriation of antiquity in Renaissance Rome, renewed in
eighteenth-century neoclassicism. Islam appears as an interloper in this
antique cradle of civilization. Yet Islam emerged indivisibly through the
formative integration of this thought.^84 Understanding Christianity as
antithetical to this tradition–which it had, after all, actively rejected
through its expulsion of the philosophers – the Abbasid caliph al-
Ma’mun saw his caliphate, not the Eastern Roman Empire, as the true
heir to Greek scholarship. Similarly, ninth-century thinkers, including al-
Farabi and al-Jahiz, traced their intellectual inheritance through Greek
philosophy. Thinkers adept at the rhetorical arts of antique philosophy
developed a system of argumentation, known asal-kalam(speech, dis-
course, orlogos), to convince non-believers of Islam.^85 Once opened, the
doors of interpretation can never be fully closed.
Contrary to a dominant historiographical model that the spread of Islam
constituted a break with its precedents, the norms of perception expressed
in early Islamic discourses underscore the continuity of late antique per-
ceptual culture and philosophy. In incorporating a growingfield of ideas,
scholars working under Islamic patronage were not interested in a compe-
titive politics of who owned ideas, but in knowledge. Rather than imagin-
ing a preexisting Islamic culture translating texts to gain access to them, a
more accurate model of translation into Arabic might be as a reflection of
the value placed on diverse texts already understood by sophisticated,
multi-lingual scholars. Translation shifted linguistic hegemony and popu-
larized access to texts already well understood by sophisticated multi-
lingual scholars. An underlying preference for inward mimesis, already
articulated in late antiquity, persisted through the Quran into later theori-
zations of Islamic perception.
Our understanding of the Quran reflects a parallel historiography.
Considered within the faith, the premise of God-as-author precludes a
historical source for the Quran. Yet, inimical to divine authorship, secular
analyses suggest that the Quran may have been compiled from Christian
and Judaic liturgical sources codified through exegesis in the Umayyad
period. This can be seen clearly in passages–including the Opening, the
Sura of Light, and the Sura of the Cave–closely resembling earlier Syriac
liturgies. The presence of an icon in the pre-Islamic Kaaba similarly
suggests the integration of Christianity in pre-Islamic Arabia. Later
(^84) Darling, 2014. (^85) Fowden, 2015 : 149–152.
The Science of Internalized Vision 129