The Quranic verses 33:4-6 contain several expressions of communal cohesion within the Islamic umma, including descriptions of the Prophet's relationship to the Believers and their relationships to one another. This paper analyzes twenty-five tafsīrs of these verses from various historical and ideological contexts, to provide a diachronic overview of how exegetes have understood the relationship between the Quranic text, history, and communal boundaries. Exegetes give most elements of the Quranic text a specific historical context through asbāb al-nuzūl. However, some elements are relegated to this distant past, while other elements appear continually relevant, linking the Quranic past to the present. The exegetes treat as more dynamic those phrases that delimit the internal and external boundaries of the umma, such as "the Prophet is closer to the believers than they are to themselves," and "possessors of relationship are closer to one another...than believers and emigrants" (33:6). Such phrases provide fodder for exegetes to bolster their own communal identities; for instance, the Shia read "possessors of relationship" as the Imams, while some Sufis understand them to be spiritual brethren. In contrast, inclusive phrases that bring outsiders into the umma get truncated and even forgotten, such as, "if you do not know their fathers, they are your brothers in religion and your mawālī" (33:5). While scholars have long noted the importance of the early Islamic mawālī, exegetes do not mention them here; even historian-exegetes such as Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr sever the link between Quranic mawālī and early Islamic mawālī. Instead, exegetes ossify the term in long-past individuals such as Zayd ibn Ḥāritha. The term's usefulness for expressing communal belonging had apparently faded by the time of the earliest tafsīrs. In all cases, exegetes mention no historical events between the revelation of the Quran and their present day—the "middle distance" of history disappears from exegetical memory. I propose that historians can fruitfully attempt to re-forge this severed link between the Quran and the first century of Islamic history. As an authoritative text, the Quran sets certain identity categories (such as mawālī) that remain relevant even as they morph to fit changing circumstances. If we are to understand who the early Islamic mawālī were, or trace other forms of relationship in the first century AH, we must search for historical glimpses of how early Muslims invoked the language of the Quran to express their communal identities.

The Futūḥ literature is replete with examples of Biblical models, narratives, and motifs, suggesting that early story-tellers, tradents, and historians drew heavily upon that rich resource in their efforts to describe the miraculous military successes of the Seventh Century. By reading between the lines, I contend that these texts reveal how early Muslims understood not just their past, but their rôle in broader human history. Muslim historians adopted and adapted Biblical patterns to recast the battles of the Futūḥ as both re-enactments of Biblical episodes and fulfilments of Biblical prophecies. The Israelite conquests provided a thematic and kerygmatic narrative precedent—particularly, the Battle of Jericho, which appears as the foil for a number of Muslim victories. A particularly salient analogy occurs in the conquest of Ḥimṣ—whose city walls collapsed following the Muslim army’s pronouncement of the takbīr. Parallels can be drawn between other Biblical battles and Muslim victories, such as the Israelite ruse during the successful conquest of Ai, which augurs that of the Muslims at Jalūlā. Such intertextuality suggests that Muslim writers engaged in a dialogue with earlier texts and their language provides a key to understanding how these parallels were intended to be read. Speeches by caliphs, generals, and envoys emphasising the divinely-ordained nature of the mission often directly echo the words of God to the Children of Israel on the eve of their conquest of Canaan. Thus, much as Qurʾān imagines the ummah as a ‘new and improved’ salvific community, the Futūḥ narratives recast the Arab-Muslim warriors as entering a Seventh-Century Promised Land. However, for historians removed from the heroïc age by a few centuries, the subsequent course of Islamic history—punctured by assassinations, civil wars, and impious rulers—represented yet another tragic cycle of human history. Their presentation of the Arab-Islamic conquests thus used Biblical paradigms to foreshadow the coming fall from glory. The accounts of the conquests became markers, signalling the departure from the idealised shell of early Islam into the profane world, the peaking of the ‘Golden Age’ of the early Islamic community, whose rending would commence shortly with the first Fitnah, and the continuity of Islamic history and the Muslim community with the prior cycles of Jewish and Christian history, with the hope that redemption might come again.

Well over a century ago, Ignaz Goldziher in his Muhammadanische Studien depicted the Shu‘ubiyya as a movement among Iranian intellectuals of the 2nd-3rd centuries AH, who denigrated the culture of the Arabs in their writings, hoping to revive the civilization of pre-Islamic Iran. Students of early Islamic Iraq and Iran have mostly accepted this definition, no doubt due to the fact this is the picture of the Shu‘ubiyya which our primary sources, most notably ‘Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-Bayan wa’l tabyin, and Muslim b. Qutayba’s Kitab al-‘Arab appear to present. At the same time however, a critical analysis of these scholars’ portrayal of the Shu‘ubiyya leaves some pressing questions that challenge this paradigm. For example, who exactly were the Shu‘ubis? For when the sources mention their polemic, they almost always paraphrase their arguments, rarely providing names. Moreover, when one studies the works and biographies of individuals generally assumed to be Shu‘ubis, there is scant evidence that any of them saw themselves as participating in such a movement, nor that they even held the views that their critics ascribed to them. Equally important is the question of why it is only in the works of the Shu‘ubiyya’s critics, the so-called “anti-Shu‘ubis,” that this movement is described. This paper aims to define the Shu‘ubiyya afresh by deconstructing commonly held notions of what this phenomenon was actually about. I argue that the Shu‘ubiyya was in fact, not representative of an Iranian revival movement, but on the contrary, it was the product of the collective imagination of intellectuals of the early ‘Abbasid period engaged in the construction of an Arab-Islamic identity and high culture. To this end, I contend that the nostalgic interest of the Arabs’ heritage and the proliferation of scholarship on the ‘ilm al-‘arab (Arab sciences) which manifested itself at the court of the early ‘Abbasid caliphs did not arise in response to the Shu‘ubiyya as some scholars have argued. Rather, the Shu‘ubiyya itself was constructed as a foil, an “Other” unto which some historians, linguists, and litterateurs chose to project commonplace social and cultural biases, and with which they could positively compare the Arab peoples, providing the latter with a place of distinction among the prominent ‘ajami (non-Arab) civilizations. By conceiving of the Shu‘ubiyya as an instrument of othering, we may account for the conspicuous absence of any self-professed Shu‘ubis, and the peculiar inability of our sources to identify them.

The premodern Middle East offers an unrivaled opportunity for consideration of cultural memory, including the cultural stores of knowledge from which groups derive awareness of their unity and particularity. Thousands of texts pertaining to all aspects of cultural history survive for the period from 750 to 1400; these are widely available in open-access digital formats on the internet. Hundreds or perhaps thousands more survive in manuscript collections across the Middle East. To these may be added other evidence of cultural memory, such as epigraphy and numismatics. This storehouse of memory can now be studied in completely new ways using digital technology that measures text reuse (i.e., the repetition of textual units). Arabic and Persian authors frequently made use of past works, cutting them into pieces and reconstituting them to address their own outlooks and concerns. Texts and fragments of texts thus flowed within profoundly intertextual circulatory systems that can be reconstructed and analyzed. This paper investigates memory of the early Muslim community in Iran as it was passed on in a fascinating 14th century multi-text compilation held in the Fazil Ahmed Pasha collection of the Köprülü library in Istanbul (01589). Like other such majmūʿāt, it is not a “book” in the conventional sense, but instead represents the collecting efforts of later times, and in its scope, something of a library in miniature. Among the 107 fragments that it contains, are several in Arabic and Persian pertaining to pre- and early Islamic Iran, e.g, a piece of a Persian translation of the Middle Persian Jāmāsp-nāmag, a Persian treatise on Pahlavi, an astrological treatise, and a history treating Abū Muslim. My team and I are transcribing this manuscript and using algorithms to trace its units within a large corpus. We are visualising this data so as to show how one text arose out of many others. In the paper, I will highlight the manuscript’s historiographical layers and the wider processes of repetition, fragmentation, and mobility that ultimately produced it. With reference to the Iranian materials, I will argue that texts such as it provide an important and under-considered entrée into cultural memory in the pre-modern Middle East, as they preserve evidence for the reading interests of educated audiences, the associations that they made between disparate topics, and their expectations for how transmission should work.