We Are the Grass

Literature and History

This episode serves as a grand retrospective for the podcast's season on early Islamic history and the broader Abrahamic religions. The host

Key takeaways

• The three Abrahamic religions share a common Semitic linguistic root (S-L-M) linked to the ancient deity Shalem.
• Mecca in the 6th century was a cosmopolitan Eurasian hub containing both polytheists and monotheists, not merely a desert outpost.

Main topics

• Abrahamic religious history
• Late Antiquity and Mecca

Notable quotes

Religion is the peanut butter of exegesis and the jelly of tradition spread over the bread of Scripture.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound synthesis of a massive historical unde

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Hello and welcome to Literature and History, episode 129, We Are the Grass. Speaker 1 (0:21) In this program, we will bring our present season on early Islamic history to a conclusion, consider what we've learned over the past 40 hours or so, and get a sense of what's coming next. We have now completed all of the Abrahamic scriptures in our podcast. We've spent some time learning about the history behind the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Quran. We've read other texts very important to the history of the Abrahamic religions, like the Talmud, the works of the church fathers, and the Hadiths. And just as importantly, we have explored the history of the non-Abrahamic world that unfolded as the Bible and the Quran were set down. We've heard other stories in literature and history, but the story of what we might call Abrahamism has been the longest one of all. Now, It's time for us to look back on the long journey that we've taken through the Abrahamic scriptures and the civilizations from which they came and to draw some general conclusions about them. I have wanted to write and record this episode for 10 years, and I hope you'll enjoy walking this final mile with me, crossing the finish line. In other words, knowing the actual contents of the Bible and the Quran and the immense history behind both of them, crossing that finish line is something to be proud of. So, let's begin. Speaker 1 (1:56) Once upon a time, in the rugged place where Africa collides with Asia and Europe, there were three sisters. The oldest sister was Jewish. The youngest sister was an Arab. The middle sister was also Jewish, although she stopped going to synagogue and eventually nearly forgot her own roots. Forgetting things, unfortunately, ran in the family because the three sisters would often forget that they were sisters in spite of all the evidence around them. When they met, All too often, they tended to argue, even though they were kindred and had much more in common than not. The oldest sister was intimidating to her younger sisters because she'd been around the longest. The youngest sister was intimidating too because she was strong and practical and had been successful from a very young age. The middle sister, over her long life, looked at her older sister and her younger sister with exasperation, feeling like no matter how much she had done in the world, a lot of it still just ignored her. Thus, they lived out their lives alternately bickering and trying to ignore one another, and occasionally exchanging polite salutations when the circumstances were just right. But at moments when the tensions between them were severe, even in their conflicts, They displayed their similarities, because again they were, and always would be, family, and their names were Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Speaker 1 (3:44) We learned about the older two sisters a while ago. But over these past 20 episodes and 40 hours, we've learned about the youngest Abrahamic religion, where Islam came from in the greater world of late antiquity, its prophet, its sacred scripture, and the story of how it brought a small band of West Arabian townspeople to control the largest empire Earth had yet known. Let's take a moment now to look back across the blockbuster three centuries of Middle Eastern history that we've covered in this past season and remember how the youngest sister of Abrahamism came into the world and changed it forever. Speaker 1 (4:50) As someone who has taught a lot of religious history, there are sentences I never get tired of saying. One of them is, The Bible is an anthology of documents from different historical periods. Again, the Bible is an anthology of documents from different historical periods. It's not a critical or incendiary declaration. It's just crisply accurate, a simple baseline statement of fact about a book that is too often presented as some monolithic block of ideology rather than, if you will allow me once again, an anthology of documents from different historical periods. And speaking of snappy sentences that sum up a lot of surprisingly seldom understood history, I also have one about Mecca. in the year 570, when the Prophet of Islam was born. That sentence is, quote, Mecca, in the year Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city where there were polytheists and monotheists, close quote. In our contemporary world, in which Muslims often think of pre-Islamic Arabia as Al-Jahiliyyah, or the period of ignorance before Islam, and non-Muslims think of Mecca and just vaguely picture a desert somewhere, it's good to remember once again that, quote, Mecca, in the year Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city where there were polytheists and monotheists, close quote. In the global English-speaking world and in the contemporary Islamic world, late antiquity is a castaway, not Islamic enough in traditional Muslim historiography and in later academic history too classical for medievalists and too medieval for classicists. Those poor unsung centuries from 200 to 600 or so, the motley orphan of academic history, got a lot of love in our podcast, and the main things we learned about them were, in the end, pretty simple. Between 200 and 600, there were a lot of major population migrations, which led to changes in the balance of power in Europe and the Mediterranean. Between 200 and 600, West Eurasia and North Africa were slowly becoming monotheistic. When the youngest sister, of Abrahamism came into the world around 600, much of the supercontinent looked like Mecca. Jewish? Yes. Christian? Yes. Pagan? Oh yeah. Zoroastrian? Yes. Combinations thereof? Yes. Mecca, as the mottled centuries of late antiquity drew toward their end, was a fulcrum. Arabia had sat, massive and durable, beneath the Mediterranean West and the Persian East for a thousand years. Alexander of Macedon had planned a conquest there before he kicked the bucket in 323 BCE. The Roman Emperor Augustus had flirted with the idea of a conquest of Arabia in 24 BCE, but when his men returned from the failed expedition, they told Augustus that the Arabian Peninsula was really a bit foreboding for a bunch of beardless Europeans who didn't know their way around a camel and couldn't find the right wadis, and so Augustus tossed up his hands and let Arabia be Arabia. And so, Arabia was Arabia. even as kings lashed armies over so much of the rest of the world. A landmass the size of Western Europe was ruled by tribes and traditions rather than faraway emperors. And although Arabia never claimed to be a land of milk and honey, from 200 to 600, it was a place blessedly free of giant civil wars and ideological persecutions. In marked contrast, to the great empires around it. As a result, people moved there. The colossal peninsula collected a peppering of various peoples from the late antique world. For Jews, persecuted and bullied out of Judea. For various kinds of Christians, persecuted and bullied by other Christians out of Constantinople. and for unremembered thousands of wandering settler families who found work there and didn't mind the hot summers, Arabia became home. The ingenuity of its indigenous population, together with the know-how and far-flung connections of immigrant groups, had already poised Arabia for a bright future on the world stage. But as the centuries of late antiquity hummed along, something else happened that showered the Arabian Peninsula with even more potential. This something else was a series of partnerships with the Roman and Persian empires. An Arab Ghassanid client kingdom arose to the peninsula's northwest, headquartered in present-day Syria that served the Romans. An Arab Lakhmid client kingdom arose to the peninsula's northeast, headquartered in present-day Iraq that served... the Persians. The Romans and Persians thought of their Arab client kings as barbarian buffers for imperial warmongering, but the Romans and the Persians did not, around about 500 CE, quite remember one of the great rules of history. That rule is that when you make weaponry and advanced military training and experience available to a culture that's subordinate to your own, that culture will not be subordinate to your own for very much longer. Speaker 1 (11:02) The pre-Islamic Arabic literature that we have helps give us a clue about what Arabia was like during the 500s, when Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs, pagan Arabs, Zoroastrian migrants, and more had all coexisted there for centuries. Jahili Arabic poetry is not a perfect historical source. Much of it was compiled in the 700s and 800s. and those doing the compiling had their own interests. But there's enough of it, and it's diverse enough, and some of it is just odd enough in its density and specificity that pre-Islamic Arabic poetry doesn't sound like stuff people would make up wholesale to invent a glorious cultural past. There are some Jahili poetic traditions that sound romantically, archetypically Arabian. The Qasida, or ode, begins and often ends with a lone rider on a horse or camel contemplating stuff among deserted Bedouin camps or in the trackless wilderness of the desert. The Salik, or wanderer poem, chronicles the thoughts of the outlaw or castaway, again, wending through arid landscapes in a state of emotive and philosophical contemplation. In the great cities of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdadi and Damascene and Alexandrian Litterati of Arabian extraction read these poems and felt romantic connections to their roots. That was what Bedouin life was like, some well-heeled Abbasids probably thought. riding huge camels through moonlit sandscapes and flexing your imagination and sometimes your biceps to come up with bottomlessly profound verses about what it was to be a person. And of course, during the real 500s CE, there were tens of thousands of miles of rocky trails and as many hardy and vigorous Arabs riding along them and thinking private, weighty thoughts. It's just that other pre-Islamic poetry points to other dimensions of what was happening on the peninsula just before Muhammad was born. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry survives, written by Arabs of Jewish and Christian tribes. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry has most of the same genres as post-Islamic Arabic poetry. There are satires, there are boast poems, there are poems about wine, love, and mourning, poems written in the courts of kings, and poems written in the middle of nowhere. The body of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry that has survived is far too large for a proper generalization. but it serves to show that Arabia's principal population was scattered along many latitudes and longitudes, engaged in a lot of different trades, and this really can't be repeated enough that many Arabs were Jews and Christians. Within this greater cultural bustle, the city of Mecca was one of the main junctions of Arabia. On the back center of the Arabian boot, Meccans knew Himyarites from present-day Yemen, Aksumites from just over the Red Sea in present-day Ethiopia, Byzantines from the Levant, Persians from Iran and Iraq, and a medley of others. and thus to return to a very synoptic sentence from earlier, quote, Mecca, in the year Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city where there were polytheists and monotheists, close quote. The youngest sister of Abrahamism came into a world that her older two sisters had helped create. Speaker 1 (15:29) In spite of Islamic posterity's fondness for the idea of al-Jahiliyyah, or the period of ignorance before Islam, the Qur'an, revealed to Muhammad between 610 and 632, has a fairly neutral attitude toward the people and civilizations who came along before the 600s CE. The world, the Qur'an says, actually went through numerous periods of devoutness, heeding the word of different Abrahamic prophets before Muhammad. The Jews and Christians had come pretty close to getting it all right. The world just needed a little nudge. And during his ministry between 610 and 632, Muhammad nudged. After a vigorous astounding life, he left behind a fledgling theocratic state in 632 CE. A century later, from Spain to the Indus Valley, from Azerbaijan to Yemen, the world was a different place. The story of the early caliphates that we covered in our show is torrential. Between 632 and 861, there were three imperial dynasties, four major civil wars, 28 caliphs, multiple sectarian movements, and moreover, enough military and cultural history to spend a lifetime studying. But also, between 632 and 861, what happened can be described fairly simply. For a thousand years, Persian regimes had generally controlled Iran and Iraq, and for nearly as long, Mediterranean regimes had controlled Egypt, North Africa, and the Levant. In the 600s CE, these regimes clocked out, and all of this territory came under Arab Islamic leadership. In the 700s, that leadership controlled an intercontinental empire. And in the 800s, that empire broke apart into smaller monarchies. Islamic empires, from 600 to 900, created a new mega-civilization at the girdle of Eurasia. But just after it coalesced, the intrinsic diversity of this civilization caused it to disperse. into smaller regional power blocks that made more cultural sense. The literature and theology that we read toward this season's close was the product of a world in transition. Ibn al-Muqaffa's Kalila and Dimna was originally a collection of beast fables from India. Later, it was translated into Middle Persian, and in the hands of Ibn al-Muqaffa, the wonderful stories of lions and oxen and crows were rendered into Arabic at the dawn of the Abbasid Caliphate. This caliphate had manifold leaders and wars, but at its heart were the cities of the Sawad, namely Baghdad and Basra, Sawad meaning the black, arable lands of the lower Fertile Crescent. This territory, as always in history, produced culture as well as agriculture. The poet Bashar ibn Burd, whom we met a couple of episodes ago, wrote poetry about life on the streets of Iraq's great big new cities, trading the antiquarian vocabulary and romantic themes of Jahiliyverse for a more modern Arabic that sounded like people actually talked in Abbasid towns. Ibn al-Muqaffa and Bashar ibn Burd were ethnic Persians in an Arabic-speaking world, and like so many of their contemporaries, they mastered the language of the colonizers and made lives for themselves in an evolving civilization. Meanwhile, to the faraway east, Zoroastrian holdouts set their oral traditions in the storied old Sasanian tongue of Middle Persian. Much of what they recorded, fortunately, still survives in what scholars of Iranian history call the 9th century books, a collection of tomes that show the continued vitality of traditional Persian religion deep into the Islamic period. And through the entire early history of the caliphates, there were also the hadiths. From the 600s to the 900s, short narratives about the Prophet Muhammad flowed among the pious Muslims of three continents, circulating in oral transmission, then informal notebooks, then compilations organized by chains of transmitters, then topically structured compilations, and finally, at the end of the 8th century, six professionally vetted multi-volume anthologies that have been at the heart of Sunnism for more than a thousand years. As we learned about this nucleus of Islamic theology and how it came to be, Islam reminded us of something very important to all three sisters of Abrahamism. In all three religions, After the coming of prophets and the writing of scriptures, the story was not over. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each emerged as a revolutionary socioeconomic force, and in each case, it took generations for transplantable doctrines to solidify from the more protean period of prophets and revelations. Religion As we've learned in our podcast, is the peanut butter of exegesis and the jelly of tradition spread over the bread of Scripture, and while the bread hails from the visionary period of prophecy, the peanut butter and jelly that cover it are made of the more happenstance ingredients of later centuries. Speaker 1 (21:33) As we explored the Hadiths in this sequence of the podcast, and then the Zoroastrian Bundahizm, the fables in Ibn al-Muqaffaz, Khalilah, and Dimna, the poetry of Bashar ibn Burd, and the history of early Sufism, we got a sense of what came next. Islam was not a cultural reset so much as a cultural stimulant. Everything that had been in the supersized Sasanian empire was still there. Everything that had been in formerly Byzantine lands was still there. Everything that had been in the Caucasus and the Iberian Peninsula and Islamic Central Asia was all still there, from cultures to languages to internecine tensions. With imperial conquests came the usual redistributions of wealth and power. And yet, in spite of the hurricane of early caliphal history, a century into the Abbasid period in 850, a lot of western Eurasia and North Africa was once more being ruled by homegrown regimes. To quote a proverb from the early Abbasid writer Ibn al-Muqaffa, quote, The grass is safe from the gale because it is flexible and bends whichever way the wind turns. Close quote. Just so, kings and governors are toppled under the typhoons of war and conquest. Culture, however, is grass, and once a storm has spent itself, grass comes right back up again, vibrant, ineradicable, and unassuming all at once. Speaker 1 (23:20) And that is a recap of the past 40 hours of literature and history. Neither any of you out there nor me are going to be able to list all of the 28 caliphs any more than we can rattle off precise dynasties of Roman emperors or biblical kings. I can't imagine you'll remember the great many battles that hastened the expansion of the early caliphates, nor the multiple parties involved in each of the four fitnas, nor the many events that slowly turned the supporters of Ali ibn Abi Talib into a distinct sect of Islam, nor the intricate processes that led to the Hadith's solidifying into a stable canon. Just so, you can't possibly remember all the material covered in our 13 hours of programs alone on Muhammad and the Quran. from the hagiographic materials on Muhammad's father and grandfather, down to his final moments with his family in Medina, from the basmala at the outset of Surah al-Fatiha to the final words of the Qur'an's very last verses. When we take long walks like this one, we don't remember every rock and shrub, every view of the horizon and bird and turning of the path. But we do remember the walk as a whole, its duration, its size, and the basics of what we saw. And as humans, our capacity to remember the overall scopes and contours of things is as reliable as our ability to forget details. And so I hope that this season has been just such a walk, and that you'll remember the titanic dimensions and overall impact of early Islamic history, even if you don't remember everything down to the chapter and verse. Most of all, maybe, I hope you'll remember that, quote, Mecca, in the year that Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city where there were polytheists and monotheists. The Mecca into which Muhammad was born was a place that had an immense amount of history behind it. Let's talk about that history. In my recording room, right now, on the other side of the wall of my sound booth, there are bookshelves. And on these bookshelves, there are two Bibles and two Qurans. They are old friends, and they've been underlined and dog-eared for years now. To the left of the Bibles, there are anthologies of Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and what survives from Ugarit and the Hittites. And around the Bibles are half a dozen books about ancient pagan cult and mystery religions, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls and a couple of anthologies of Second Temple Apocrypha, and then the early Christian stuff, Second and Third Century Church Fathers, the Nag Hammadi Library, more Apocrypha, Jerome, Two collections of Manichean scriptures, and right next to them St. Augustine, just to remind the old grouch of his roots. An anthology of the Talmud and one of the Agadah, or stories from the Talmud, and then two good scholarly Qurans, then two one-volume anthologies of the Hadith scholars al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn Hajjaj. The whole stack of books I just described, generally the most important primary texts of the ancient Near Eastern and Abrahamic religions, is about a meter thick. I like looking at it sometimes. The story that it tells is all connected. Now we know that story. And of all the many gods we've met on the way through that meter of text, as we've become acquainted with the sisters of Abrahamism, there's just one more god to whom I'd like to introduce you. He was an ancient Canaanite god, and his name was Shalem. Shalem is mentioned in the inscriptions of Ugarit, that Bronze Age civilization on the coast of what is today Syria. Shalem was the son of El, the divine patriarch of Ugarit, whose name was later repurposed in the Tanakh as one of the names of God. Shalem was likely the Ugaritic god of the dusk, just as his brother was the deity of the dawn. and Shalem was associated with the sacred passing of day to night. His name comes from a very important Semitic language root. In Hebrew, Shin, Lamed, Mem. In Arabic, Sin, Lam, Mim. And in English, S-L-M. This very old North Semitic triconsonant, S-L-M. For Shalem, for more than 3,000 years, across multiple continents and religions, has meant the same thing. SLM means peace or safety, just as the ancient Canaanite god of the dusk, Shalem, brought the serenity of evening to late Bronze Age Ugarit. Hardly any of us have heard the name Shalem. Bronze Age deities of the Eastern Mediterranean aren't exactly common knowledge. But many of us know the word Shalom, Hebrew for peace, which is used idiomatically for hello and goodbye. And many of us know the greeting As-salamu alaykum, the global Arabic and Islamic greeting which means peace be upon you. And just as Shalom, and As-salamu use the Bronze Age triconsonant S-L-M, so too does the name Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem, either named after the god Shalim, or more simply meaning something like City of Peace. The Ugaritic god of peaceful dusk, S-L-M, is also behind the words Islam and Muslim, which, as we learned some episodes ago, mean submission and one who submits. This is all old news to speakers of Hebrew and Arabic. But for those of us outside of Semitic languages, the old god Shalem, son of El, offers a touching lesson. From the earliest verses of the Bible to the completion of the Quran, the Abrahamic scriptures took about 1,300 years to produce. Nevertheless, all three Abrahamic religions, down to the words they use every day, are part of the same cultural thoroughfare. They came from a connected group of speakers of largely Semitic languages who lived on the back and calf of the Arabian boot, who to this day greet one another with wishes of peace using the name of a forgotten God. The story of the Sisters of Abrahamism is right there, plain as day. or plain as the peaceful dusk of the god Shalim, in that meter-thick mass of books on my shelves. It's a long story, but again, we've heard the whole thing now, and although telling it took me ten years and put some new lines around my eyes, I'm damned proud to have gone from Sumer to the Surahs with you, with Shalim, the god of twilight and peace, there the whole way. In our podcast, From the Middle Bronze Age to the Abbasid Caliphate, we've learned how these religions came to be. And now, finally, I think it's a good time to ask two simple questions. Why did Abrahamic monotheism win? And what if it hadn't? Speaker 1 (31:38) The sisters of Abrahamism were born under surprisingly similar circumstances. All three of them, in the beginning, sought a revolutionary upset to an extant socioeconomic order. King Hezekiah of Judah, who was on the throne in Jerusalem around 700 BCE, lived in a time of turmoil. As a Neo-Assyrian invasion pummeled the north of what is today Israel, in Jerusalem, King Hezekiah's regime saw an influx of northern refugees flooding into Judah. Hezekiah was a monotheist. The religious order with which he was aligned controlled the first temple on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And thus, under Hezekiah, church and state locked arms to broadcast a unified message. Do not sacrifice animals on adjacent hilltops