Al-Wajal wal-tawaththuq bil-'amal, one of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s (d. 894) numerous adab works, exhorts the reader on fear of God and confidence in deed, through the example of St. Antony of Egypt. The Wajal consists of three distinct narrative units: Reports by Muhammad’s Companions and Successors, a framing story in which King Aṭnāws, on his death bed, advises his dignitaries to select a new leader, and a dialogue episode in which St. Antony explains his ascetic practices and narrates nine parables to exhort the king’s dignitaries. The framing story in the Wajal explicitly identifies the Antony in this text as St. Antony of Egypt, while the dialogue that is embedded within it preserves an interesting memory of Antony – as a narrator of stories on fear of God. This particular representation of Antony, with no known textual precedent in the Christian tradition, appears to be informed by both Antony’s persona in the Life of Antony written by Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) and the saint’s image in the Apophthegmata Patrum. The Wajal integrates these various hagiographical traditions and presents a new memory of the saint, for a new (Muslim) audience, demonstrating the expansion of the saint’s hagiographical dossier in the Middle Ages. This paper contextualizes the Wajal within the broader literary and cultural expressions of Christianity and Islam in the early Middle Ages, emphasizing the role of Christian holy men as sources of universal piety and wisdom in Islamic literature and broader semiotic systems. Arguing against the usefulness of the category of pseudoepigraphy, this paper revisits important concepts such as authorship and transmission of hagiographical knowledge between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages in light of the representation of Antony in the Wajal.

Despite being constructed centuries apart, in different traditions, and for different purposes, the Babylonian Talmud and Arabic historical chronicles share striking structural similarities. Both texts are created from ur-texts that survive only in their recensions (the Jerusalem Talmud and the akhbar of earlier Arabic historical reports, respectively), and were compiled by a process of selective augmentation, omission, emendation, and alteration. In the Talmud, the work was done by the scholars known as the Amoraim and the (anonymous) Stammaim in the construction of the Talmud from earlier Tannaitic material, and by the historians themselves in the case of the chronicles. This structural similarity provides a usable common denominator for comparison. Although the historiographical traditions are fundamentally so different—the Jewish Talmudic tradition emerging amongst an educated elite of politically disempowered exiles, and the Arabic tradition emerging from a culturally, politically, and religiously confident global civilization—both ultimately had grapple with serious questions that emerged in the wake of communal catastrophes. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the wake the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi al-Ta’rikh was compiled with the Mongol invasions in process (with further conquests, including of his own territory, looming). Each of these calamities was potentially existentially threatening to those communities, and such calamities are particularly troubling to a Monotheistic survivor. Questions of God’s omnipotence and His favor naturally arose. Rather than question the fundamental assumptions that underpinned Judaism’s and Islam’s conceptions of the nature of God and their communal relationship to Him, the compilers of these works responded in strikingly similar ways: by inventing (or perhaps reviving) stories that explained these catastrophes as God’s logical punishment for the misdeeds of a small number of individuals—misdeeds that violated specific communal moral norms, rather than misdeeds that logically accounted for the calamity. The Talmud traces the destruction of the Second Temple to a mis-addressed party invitation and inhospitable behavior; Ibn al-Athir places the blame for the Mongol calamity on the shoulders of the Khwarazm-Shah, who provoked fitna by failing to give the bay’a to the Abbasid caliph al-Nasir. This paper will examine the narrative similarities of these accounts.

This paper analyzes early Islamic historiographical memory of two prominent South Arabian soothsayers of the Jahiliyya, Satih b. Rabi‘a and Shiqq al-Yashkuri. These mysterious old fortunetellers, whose accounts are heavily steeped in lore, are reported by Muslim akhbaris to have predicted major historical events leading up to and including the rise of Islam. For example, in a tradition stemming through Ibn Ishaq, they foretold to the South Arabian chieftain and progenitor of the Lakhmid dynasty, Rabi‘a ibn Nasr, of the Abysinian conquest of Yemen, its subsequent reconquest by a native Yemeni dynasty, and the rise of Islam. Another tradition has Satih predicting the fall of the Sasanian empire to occur under his successors. I hope to highlight two important roles played by these dynamic personages from the perspective of Islamic historiography. First, through both their predictions and ubiquitous presence at different times and places in the early Islamic canon of the pre-Islamic period, they function as connectors, harmonizing ancient and contemporaneous traditions and diverse peoples into a logical, flowing account; and synchronizing disparate historical traditions of the Arabian peninsula itself, as well as of the non-Arabs, into a universal Islamic master narrative. Second, from the standpoint of identity construction, these two soothsayers must be viewed through the lens of “rediscovery” of Jahiliyya culture demarcating scholarship of the early ‘Abbasid period. That is, as Muslim philologists and historians endeavored to build a unified Arab culture that could compete with the world’s other major civilizations, these soothsayers (along with other old Arab predictors) served moralizing akhbaris as legitimizing agents for the Arabs. For through the propagandistic subtext in the accounts of the soothsayers, that lying underneath the polytheism dominating the society of the Jahiliyya was a deeper current of foreknowledge of the coming of Islam, as well as a respect for monotheistic values and Abrahamic traditions, the akhbaris were in effect, justifying the place of the Arabs as the bearers of the divinely revealed faith under whose banners the non-Arabs would be conquered. In this context, the Arab Satih’s prediction of the fall of the Sasanian dynasty is a statement of changing power dynamics, foreshadowing the Arabs’ replacing of the Persians as the leaders of a world civilization and a glorious empire.