Sean W. Anthony
Professor, historian, specialist in Mashriqī Studies at 𝕿𝖍𝖊 @OhioState University
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1/ Recently I’ve been revisiting the issue of the Ḥajj and the Kaʿbah in early Islam, and I started collecting the earliest historical attestations to Muslim reverence for the Kaʿb...
The only people being written out of history here are the Byzantines who actually preserved the Greek originals. [NB there's scant evidence that any *complete* work of Plato was tr...
Since olfactory oppression is on the minds of many, here’s two examples from Arabic literature courtesy of al-Jāḥiẓ and his Kitāb al-Ḥayawān (Eng. “Book of Living Being/Animals” hi...
Reading a new essay by Devin Stewart, "Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century" (2024). It's on the history of qur'anic studies scholarshi...
Apparently medieval citrus trees were generally not grown for their fruit? Ibn Khaldūn relates how the proliferation of gardens with citrus trees was regarded as sign of a city’s i...
No lies detected. From Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī’s Aʿlām al-nubuwwah (tr. Tarif Khalidi) https://t.co/4EQPbYKYos
Qurʾan refers to “the believers, the Jews, the Christian, and the Sabians (allaḏīn ʾāminū wa’llaḏīna hādū wa’l-naṣārā wa-l-ṣābiʾīn)” (2:62, 5:69; cf. 22:17). Who are these Sabians?...
Jerusalem’s sanctity in Muslim belief is well known, and most famously expounded in a genre called ‘The Merits of Jerusalem (faḍāʾil bayt al-maqdis)’. But most collections of thes...
🧵A 9th-cent. historian of Mecca, Abū l-Walīd al-Azraqī, transmits several stories abt how the Prophet Muḥammad spared an icon (ṣūrah) of Mary and Jesus from destruction when he pur...
*important new discovery* An early, dated Arabo-Islamic inscription from Ḥismā that mentions the the prophet Muhammad by name. This one is dated to the end of 80AH[=January 700CE]...