of writings whose interrelationship is significant for understanding the
production of each text and the cumulative development of a rich Muslim
literature on religious others, only part of which falls within what I defined
above as the pre-modern study of religions. My amplification of the chart does
not significantly alter Monnot’s conclusions. He argued (Monnot 1985: 44–46)
that the second Islamic century witnessed the confrontation of two primary
literary currents: on the one hand, polemical writings where the Mu‘tazil¥s
attacked the old pre-Islamic religions and, on the other, books written by
Muslims out of curiosity for non-Islamic worldviews. These two categories
correspond respectively to ‘refutations’, a polemical form of negative prescrip-
tion, and ‘descriptions’, an inquisitive form of writing that seeks to describe
more than to judge. In the third Islamic century, the growth in polemical
refutations and descriptions led to the development of what Monnot called
‘general heresiographies’, which I prefer to call ‘literature on religious others’.
This last genre is the only one containing works that can be included in a pre-
modern study of religions.
Monnot explained this generic consolidation between refutations and
descriptions by noticing the transition from polemical writings (kutub al-radd)
to the progressively more systematized treatises (al-maqÇlÇt), within which
category the general heresiographies fall. This consolidation occurred between
the second and fourth Islamic centuries, a time when a variety of religious
others were found in the early Islamic Arabic literature, as well as in non-
Islamic Arabic and non-Arabic literatures. A combination of other pre-
conditions was required for this new literature on religious others to develop:
literatiwith some degree of individual expression and certain intellectual tools,
centralization of literary production in urban centers, use-value of texts linked
to political struggles, sponsorship by powerful political agents, and the need
for justifying an ultimate ‘Truth’. All of these elements were present in the
context of the early Abbasid Caliphate (8th and 9th centuries CE), when fierce
competition over ultimate meaning fueled the rise in refutations of both non-
Muslim religions and various Islamic tendencies. Surprisingly, in the fourth
Islamic century, the number of new refutations dropped drastically, in no small
part due to the decline of Mu‘tazil¥prominence in intellectual circles and the
overall victory of Islam over the Manichaeans, whose headquarters moved from
Baghdad to Samarqand. In the next century, the production numbers remained
similar, although the authors were by then Iranian Muslims writing on religious
others in Arabic, with one exception written in Persian. Monnot concluded
that, by the sixth Islamic century (12th century CE):
The danger for Islam has passed. The controversy, mutated into
heresiography for more than two centuries, transforms itself impercep-
tibly into a history of religions, and becomes as such the context for works
and investigations with objective tendencies which used to appear till then
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
NORTH AFRICA AND WEST ASIA
81
