222 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The Iranian cultural zone reaches well into Central Asia, and the Sasanians
were obliged to attend at least as much to threats from steppe empires as
from East Rome. Central Asian population movements were also related to
the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. yet the tendency of European and
North American historians to treat Latin Europe as the privileged exit from
Antiquity, and the harbinger of modernity, works against serious attention
to Central Asia in the overall historical narrative. By shifting the geographi-
cal frame of reference eastward, Before and after Muhammad raises the ques-
tion of whether these two peripheral regions, Central Asia and Western Eu-
rope, ought to be given more equal weighting.
Chapter 5
The final three chapters of Before and after Muhammad illustrate how intel-
lectual and spiritual traditions benefit from, and support, longer periodiza-
tions. In chapter 5 I highlight Aristotelianism because it was until recently
upstaged by the Platonist strand in late Greek thought, but also for the role
played especially by the Organon in polemic within and between Judaism,
Christianity and Islam. Thanks to translation into English, the Alexandrian
commentaries on Aristotle are now widely accessible; and even Syriac Aris-
totelianism has latterly been the object of intense research in Paris and Car-
diff. It is still almost unheard of, though, for even a collaborative venture to
cover the whole history of First Millennium Aristotelianism—and still that
is not the whole story, since translations from both Arabic and Greek gave
Aristotle a new lease of life in the Latin world too, from the twelfth century.
There is also a major and influential group of pseudo- Aristotelian texts,
which must be incorporated in this narrative, because for those who pro-
duced and read them they were genuine Aristotle, with remarkably few
questions asked.
Although the translation of Aristotle from Greek via Syriac into Arabic is
well- trodden territory, it remains unclear how exactly this project related to
the rational reflection on the Qurʾān, which almost from the outset came
naturally to some followers of Muhammad and seems, at least initially, not to
have been indebted to the Greek tradition. Before and after Muhammad
emerged, in part, from an earlier, unpublished book on Rational Islam. The
project would be best continued by an expert on Arabic thought. Mean-
while, the Zaydi libraries of yemen and the two Firkovich collections in
Saint Petersburg continue to yield unexpected treasures of Muʿtazili theol-
og y; while the Intellectual History of the Islamicate World research unit,
headed by Sabine Schmidtke at the Freie Universität Berlin, has been vigor-
ously publishing and studying them since 2011.