A key point in the study of Achemenid religion is the date of Zarathushtra, over which scholars have been long divided. One group judged the issue on the evidence of the Gathas, the seventeen hymns attributed to the prophet. These are composed in the oldest known stage of ‘Avestan’ (the eastern Iranian language of the Avesta or Zoroastrian holy texts), and have their closest linguistic affinities with the Rig-Veda. The social and world outlook implicit in them is correspondingly archaic, and so it was deduced that Zarathushtra must have lived about 1000 b.c.e. or even earlier.

The other group of scholars laid weight on a date to be derived from a late chapter of the Bundahishn. This is a composite Pahlavi work, that is, it belongs to the secondary Zoroastrian literature preserved in Pahlavi or Middle Persian, most of which was written down between the fourth and tenth centuries c.e. The chapter in question contains king-lists designed to fill out a schematized world-history; and it gives a place to Kavi Vishtaspa, Zarathushtra's royal patron, which sets the prophet's floruit at ‘258 years before Alexander’. This is the date expressly recorded, as that assigned by the Zoroastrians to their prophet, by the early Islamic scholars al-Mascudi and al-Biruni. Its modesty and apparent precision made it seem credible to some modern scholars, who accordingly assigned Zarathushtra to the sixth century b.c.e., supposing him thus to have been an eastern Iranian con temporary of the Achemenid Cyrus the Great.

An account of the prophecy and Psalms of the Persian period – that is, the two hundred years of Persian rule over Palestine from 538 to 330 b.c.e. – is fraught with the same difficulties as any other history of prophecy and Psalms within a given period. The problems arise first from the peculiar way in which the literature of the Old Testament psalmists and prophets was handed down, and secondly from the particular circumstances in which the literature of prayer came to be written.

Thus in the first instance written prophecies and prophetic testimonies were rapidly collected into small anthologies; these were then put together to form larger collections and whole books. In the course of this anthologizing process, what were originally anonymous prophetic utterances were very frequently attributed to named prophets, either because within the oral tradition the sayings of well-known prophets had already been enriched by the addition of anonymous material, or because an attempt was made thereby to give authority to anonymous utterances as pseudo-epigraphic literature. The result of this whole process is that most prophetic books represent, not the sole product of a single author, but a complicated tapestry of utterances from a variety of sources. This means that scholars have to deal with an abundance of anonymous and pseudo-epigraphic texts which can be dated and placed in historical order only through an indirect approach. We must find and interpret evidence that will help us place the texts in the right order and we must produce arguments to establish which indeed are the pseudo-epigraphic texts.

DEVELOPMENT OF MUḤAMMAD'S MESSAGE

The chronology of the material contained in the Qur'ān on which any attempt to follow the development of Muhammad's teaching must rest, has been the subject of intense study both by Muslim scholars and by orientalists. Yet it cannot be said their studies take us very far. The main obstacles are formidable: the largely composite nature of the sūrahs the neutral order of the sūrahs in the textus receptus; and the relative lack of distinct reference to events for which there is reasonably firm evidence elsewhere.

Muslim studies of the chronology centre on the reasons for revelations, the asbāb al-nuzūl. Wherever reasons for a revelation were thought to exist, they were treated not only in the Sīrah, Ḥadīth and Tafsīr, but also in specialized works dealing only with the asbāb al-nuzūl. Muslim scholars were aware of, but did not follow up, other criteria, such as those of style. It was noted, for example, that the earliest sūrahs had short verses and that the length of the verses tended to increase as time went on. On a more detailed level, the use of the phrase “O people”, mainly a Meccan usage, was contrasted with that of “O you who believe”, used only at Medina.

Judgement based on the asbāb al-nuzūl is a useful approach, for proper identification of a passage with something external provides the only sound evidence for dating it. Weakness lay in execution rather than in method.

In any fully evolved literary culture – and this includes both Arabic and English – one tends to think of the prose–verse antithesis as a primary and fundamental dichotomy. Yet on a broader view, and taking into account the pre-literate antecedents of the literary culture, an even more fundamental dichotomy is that between everyday discourse on one hand, and on the other hand elevated styles of diction, no matter whether they be verse or formal prose. Within the domain of the elevated style, there is a gradation to be observed. One may have straighforward narrative, or utterances which seek to arouse the hearers' emotions by the use of linguistic devices. These devices are not necessarily those of rhythmical regularity (i.e. metre) which constitute, in Arab and European thought alike, the essential feature of “verse”. Ancient Near Eastern literatures, and above all the Hebrew Old Testament, employ for this purpose a style of elevated diction which European scholars have not hesitated to call “poetry”.

The fundamental appeal of that style lies not in acoustic effect but in a semantic patterning, which has been described by Eissfeld as follows:

The Umayyad period (40–132/661–750) is one of the most interesting and important for the critic of poetry. More than the verse of any other period prior to modern times, Umayyad poetry was in dynamic development and registered, obliquely and directly, the deeper changes in the spiritual condition of the times. This period of rapid development was flanked by more settled periods of poetic creativity: on the one side the pre-Islamic, on the other the 'Abbasid poetry; and there can be no doubt that Umayyad poetry stems from a powerful poetic tradition of high achievement. The verse of al-Akhtal (Ghiyāth b. Ghawth of Taghlib, d. 92/710), for example, seems to grow out of a well-rooted tradition, developed to a kind of perfection by generations of poets. The verse of a poet like the Qurashite 'Umar b. Abī Rabīah (23–93/643–711) gives a different impression. He wrote experimental poetry that deviated in tone and technique from the poetry preceding it. Nevertheless, although he did not model himself on the pre-Islamic heritage except occasionally, he still built on the achievements of his predecessors, and profited from the strength and malleability of their techniques.

Umayyad poetry abounds with experiments. Many aspects of the poem were explored. New moods and themes were introduced, points of emphasis were shifted, and old motifs reappeared, intensified and sometimes exaggerated. This is a period in which an unrivalled revolution took place spontaneously, unbound as yet by imposed traditionalism.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE ARABIC LANGUAGE

In the first half of the first millennium A.D., the landmass bounded by the fringes of the Anatolian highlands, the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, and the western escarpment of the Iranian plateau, was the home of a family of languages now commonly termed Semitic. Intruding into the area were Greek-speaking populations within the boundaries of the Roman–Byzantine empire, and Middle Persian within those of the Sasanian empire; outside it, the Aksumite kingdom of Ethiopia also used a Semitic language. While the various members of this language-family are differentiated from each other in detail as sharply as are European languages such as French and Spanish, they exhibit general similarities which set them off, as a group, from languages such as Persian, which belongs to the Indo-European language-family.

By the early centuries A.D., two of the most important members of the Semitic language-family had virtually disappeared from the scene: Akkadian, the ancient language of Mesopotamia, was extinct; and Hebrew remained only as a learned and liturgical language no longer in everyday use. But two other important languages still dominated the area culturally. In the north, there was a cluster of Aramaic dialects, two of which have special significance, namely Syriac (used by the Christian populations of Syria and Mesopotamia) and Nabataean (used by pagan populations centred on the great caravan city of Petra). In the south, present-day Yemen was the home of an antique culture, of which the dominant representative was the kingdom of Saba (Sheba). The Sabaic language of pre-Christian times shows sufficient distinctive characteristics to warrant us in treating it as an independent language within the Semitic family.

The standard English-language history of Arabic literature has long been The literary history of the Arabs by Reynold A. Nicholson, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, first published as long ago as 1907, but reprinted several times. To this day it remains a sympathetic, and indeed a valuable, introduction to one of the world's great literatures, but much water has flowed under the bridge since it first appeared, and the only general survey in English to appear since then, H. A. R. Gibb's Arabic literature (Oxford, 1926, 2nd revised edn 1963), is very condensed and makes no pretence at covering the immense field of Arabic literature in depth. It was the need for a more extensive history, to take in new fields and survey the results of over half a century of research, that prompted the Cambridge University Press to establish, in several volumes, a new history of Arabic literature on a much larger scale.

Since the beginning of the century, an enormous number of previously unknown manuscripts has been brought to light and catalogued, while a vast range of classical, medieval and later texts has been published in editions of varying quality. The two small original volumes of Carl Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (1898–1902) may be compared with the three bulky volumes of its Supplement (the last appeared in 1942), and this, in turn, with the six large volumes of Fuat Sezgin's Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums in current production, yet covering only the literature up to 430/1039, in order to comprehend the tremendous developments that have taken place.

THE WRITING OF DOCUMENTS IN THE PRE-ISLAMIC AGE

The Arabian civilization into which the Prophet Muhammad was born had long been a literate and highly organized society. For some time before Islam Arabians were writing in the Arabic language, though the question of the scripts they employed is a complicated matter. Letters in the language of Najrān, probably Arabic, are mentioned in the Letter of Simeon of Bêth Arshâm, recently brought to light, and the Najrān chiefs used to inherit writings or books from one another. At Husn Mabraq of Wādī am-Naqa‘, in the territory of the Nakha‘ī tribe of the southern Yemen, “Himyarī” and Kufic rock inscriptions figure side by side, and very early Arabic rock inscriptions or graffiti are to be found in many parts of western Arabia. The people who scribbled on these rocks cannot but have belonged to a society with a high degree of literacy.

The conventional forms and phraseology of written political documents, already well established when Muhammad came upon the scene, were generally followed by him. Indeed the doctrine, formulated in the later development of Islam, that Muhammad could neither read nor write is hardly tenable. To Richard Bell's advocacy of his literacy must be joined the fact of the Prophet's social standing. How could the scion of the aristocratic religious house, who reckoned famous arbiters like ‘Abd al-Muttalib among his close ancestors, and who took charge of trading caravans to Syria, lack so essential an accomplishment? If the Thaqīf merchants of al-Ta'if kept “sheets” (sahīfah, pi. suhuf) recording loans plus interest, surely the Prophet would keep written accounts?

One of the greatest of the infidels killed at Badr, which was the first victory for the fledgeling forces of Islam, was the renowned Nadr b. al-Hārith. His death was lamented by his sister in an elegy of moving eloquence; the Prophet is reported to have felt so much sorrow when he heard this poem that he said he would not have allowed Nadr to be killed, if he had heard the poem before his death.

Nadr was learned in Persian literature, and his opposition to the Prophet and to Islam took the strange form of interpreting this struggle as a contest of excellence in storytelling. “I am a better teller of tales,” he asserted; “Muhammad tells tales from the past, but I relate the histories of the great Persian heroes, Rustam and Isfandiyār.” He had such success in vexing the Prophet that it was he who ordered Nadr to be killed at Badr, though it was rarely that he gave such orders, and to that extent it was out of character.

This narrative and other less well-known historical anecdotes show the hold that storytellers had over the Arabs even at this early date, and it gives an indication of the nature of this kind of popular oral literature, often based on a core of heroic poetry.

Within this cultural milieu it was only natural for them to seek to weave new narratives around the life and deeds of Muhammad, the greatest of their heroes. But storytellers and other narrators, although they recognized this need and were capable of meeting it, were nevertheless handicapped in many ways.

In the domain of artistic prose it is the spoken, rather than the written word that we primarily associate with the Umayyads. In the various sectors of Umayyad public life it was necessary for a man, whether preacher, governor or general, to declaim in clear and vigorous language the views he commanded or recommended. Khatābah (not kitābah) was the strategic instrument of practical politics, and its essential nature is known to us even if we cannot accept as genuine all specimens of the genre that are attributed to the period. We can, in short, be sure that the political and religious leaders of the Umayyad period, of whatever persuasion or affiliation, struck out a vein of strong native rhetoric and afforded the raw material for the development of an artistic prose literature. But while preachers, governors and generals cultivated the practice of pulpit oratory and martial rhetoric, the Arabic tongue was being subjected to a process of growth in a different direction and expanding, under the hands of the secretarial class, into a language of written prose composition suited to the needs of the court and the administration.

The precise point at which the process began is difficult to ascertain, but it is axiomatic that ‘Abd al-Malik's substitution of Arabic for Greek and Persian in the imperial bureaux from 78/697 onwards contained within it the seeds of all future developments in the field of Arabic secretarial literature.

In general, the word maghāzī means raiding expeditions, primarily for the sake of plunder. But as a literary technicality, it is specifically applied to the accounts of the early Muslim military expeditions in which the Prophet took part; those at which he was not personally present are termed sarāyā or bu'ūth. At the same time, the early books of maghāzī include accounts of events which are not military expeditions, such as the treaty-making at Hudaybiyah, the Prophet's last pilgrimage (Hajjat al-wadā), etc. Obviously, this maghāzī literature forms a sub-category within the Sirah literature (see chap. 17), and the two words are used by later commentators in juxtaposition, as in phrases such as “compilers of maghāzī and siyar” there is, indeed, a hint that maghāzī is the dominant identifying term, for Ibn Ishāq is more often referred to as a compiler of maghāzī than of sīrah. The dichotomy between the two is, in fact, an artificial one and the phrase sīrah–maghāzī would probably reflect more accurately the essential homogeneity of the material. But this chapter deals with the maghāzī material insofar as it is possible to consider it separately.

In terms of form as well as theme, maghāzī literature is superficially reminiscent of the pre-Islamic accounts of tribal battles (ayyām al-'Arab): both deal with battles and are a melange of prose and verse. But though maghāzī literature is thus heir to an ancient tradition, it is more than a record of individual skirmishes, and the role of verse in it is a secondary one.

Sīrah literature (biography of the Prophet), inspired as it was by the imposing personality of the Prophet and bearing the marks of the stormy political events of the conquests, of the social changes in the Muslim community and of the struggle of the different factions, came into being in the period following the death of the Prophet. It developed in the first half of the first century of the hijrah, and by the end of that century the first full-length literary compilations were produced. The development of Sīrah literature is closely linked with the transmission of the Ḥadīth and should be viewed in connection with it. Most of the reports about utterances and orders of the Prophet were, during his lifetime, transmitted orally, and few of them seem to have been written down. Although some accounts about the recording of the utterances, deeds and orders dictated by the Prophet to his Companions are dubious and debatable1 and should be examined with caution (and ultimately rejected), some of them seem to deserve trust. The pacts which the Prophet concluded with the different groupings in Medina after his arrival in that city were apparently written down so as to serve as the legal basis for their communal life. His letters to rulers, governors and chiefs of tribes are recorded in some of the compilations of the Sīrah. The Sīrah also contains accounts of pacts concluded between the Prophet and conquered tribes or localities and of grants bestowed upon tribal leaders.

The Syriac-speaking Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia made one of the most important contributions to the intellectual efflorescence centred in 'Abbasid Baghdad which became the chief glory of medieval Islam. The first century and a half of the 'Abbasid dynasty saw the momentous movement of translation of Greek, Syriac and Persian works into Arabic and the transference of Hellenistic lore to the followers of the Arabian Prophet. In the years following the founding of Baghdad the major philosophical works of Aristotle and the Neoplatonic commentators, the chief medical writings of Hippocrates and Galen, the mathematical works of Euclid and the geographical work of Ptolemy became available to readers of Arabic. In this movement it was the Syrians who were the chief mediators.

To understand how Syriac came to exercise its important influence on Arabic literature it is necessary to have a clear picture of the development of Syriac literature itself. This development may be divided into three stages. The first period extended from the pre-Christian era to the eighth century A.D., and is represented by the few surviving pagan works (e.g. the Story of Ahīqār and the writings of Māra bar Seraphion and Bāba of Harrān), and a far more extensive Christian literature. It commences with the Bible in successive versions (Monophysite versions, Malkite versions and Nestorian versions), commonly called Peshitta (“simple”), for the Syrian church seems never to have been satisfied with its translations.