PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER
RESEARCH
Chapter 1
Comparing the opening chapters of the Cambridge history of Islam (1970)
with those of its successor, the New Cambridge history of Islam (2010), one
observes how European and American Islamolog y now acknowledges the
rise of late Antiquity, and studies the seventh- century Arab conquests and
the birth of Islam against the background of Iranian and Roman rivalry in
and around Arabia—also of the development, both separately and interac-
tively, of the region’s religious traditions, Mazdaism, Judaism, and Christian-
ity. The Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences Corpus Coranicum proj-
ect, and in particular Angelika Neuwirth’s Der Koran als Text der Spätantike:
Ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin 2010), applies this perception to study of
the Qurʾān and its rabbinic and patristic antecedents. Late Antiquity and
Islam are both emerging from the mutual isolation in which they once were
studied. This makes research more demanding than when it was conducted
independently, and with minimal mutual awareness, by students of Middle
Persian, Greek, or Arabic, and mostly concentrating on either pre- or post-
seventh- century events. But for a recent example of the payoff, see Parvaneh
Pourshariati, Decline and fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian- Parthian
confederacy and the Arab conquest of Iran (2008), revising our understanding
of underdocumented Sasanid Iran by using both Arabic and Persian sources
from the Islamic period to study continuities in social structures through the
seventh century.
These wide horizons in both space and time had already been surveyed by
Edward Gibbon back in the 1780s. After narrating the fifth- century decline
and fall of Old Rome on the Tiber, Gibbon took two unpredictable deci-
sions: first to follow the fortunes of New Rome on the Bosphorus rather
than recounting the familiar tale of Papacy and Christian Germanic Empire;
and second to allow himself to be distracted by the seventh- century Arab
defeat of East Rome into investigating the rise of the Caliphate and Islam,