discussions of the legitimacy of pre-Islamic and Judaic texts known as
israeliyyatunderscore scholarly engagement with these sources.^86 One of
several contending theories concerning the early history of the Quran
suggests that Arabs came to rule through gradual Roman withdrawal
rather than conquest, resulting in an additive early Islamic culture. While
the Arabic (Bedouin) populace at the time was pagan, elites practiced an
Abrahamic monotheism. The increased separation from the Eastern
Roman Empire by‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (r. 685–705) led to a con-
solidation of an Arab monotheistic religion, separate but related to Judaism
and Christianity at a time when the variety of their texts and liturgies had
also not been reduced into their modern canonical forms.^87 Fred Donner
uses the vocabulary of the Quran itself to argue thatmuslimin(lit.‘those
who submit,’but understood as‘Muslims’), initially referred not to the
followers of a new religion of submission (Islam), but to believers of a non-
differentiated monotheistic practice with a charismatic leader.^88
Emerging within late antique culture, receptive precepts implicit in the
Quran nourished antique notions of mimesis. The notion of a deeply
subjective understanding of the sensory world imprinted on the heart of
the believer moved from an implicit precept in the Quran to explicit
theorization in the thought of ibn Sina, the science of ibn al-Haytham,
and the inspiration of al-Ghazali. Even if secular science denies divine
origins to the Quran, faith in its sacrality offers a different mode of knowing
that performs the inherent divinity of the text. For the believer, the
presence of God relies not on worldly history, but on the articulation of
divine speech. Between these possibilities of truth, only God can know.^89(^86) Bernstein, 2006 :9. (^87) Nevo and Koren, 2003. See also Donner, 2008 : 30.
(^88) Donner, 2010.
(^89) Akkach relates a sixteenth-century adjudication between the testimony of faith and that of
reason through a comparable solution. Akkach,2005b: 115–116.
130 Seeing with the Heart