Скачать или смотреть [01] Religious Landscape of Pre-Islamic Arabia | Dr. Farhad Ghoddoussi

An Analysis Based on Primary (Epigraphic) and Contemporary Sources

Topic: Introduction and Discussion about Methodology

Summary:
In this lecture series, our goal is to gain a better understanding of the religious and social background of the audience and community that became the first believers in the message of Prophet Muhammad (ص).

That is, we aim to understand and, to some extent, reconstruct and contextualize how the earliest audience—both those who believed in this message and those who did not—might have understood Prophet Muhammad's revelations, later collected in the book known as the Qurʾān. How did the Jews, Christians, and polytheists (Gentiles) in Mecca, Medina, and elsewhere perceive the message presented in these revelations?

We adopt a historical approach, surveying the religious landscape of Late Antique Arabia from the 2nd century AD through the 7th century, focusing on three communities: Jewish, Christian, and Gentile. In our discussion, we focus on primary and contemporary sources rather than secondary and later ones.

Accordingly, our discussion relies on:
1) Dated or datable material evidence, which is considered both primary and contemporary and will consist mostly of inscriptions in their two categories: monumental and graffiti.

2) Contemporary literary evidence, which is divided into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are in Arabic and include the Qurʾān, the Constitution of Medina, and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Secondary sources are non-Arabic texts, mostly in Syriac and Greek, written by scholars living in the Near East.

3) Non-contemporary literary evidence, This is a vast pool of texts in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac, and other languages. Although some contain eyewitness narrations and are therefore apparently primary sources, the time span between the events and their recording means they are usually treated by Western scholarship as secondary sources.

In this first lecture, we examined inscriptions and the validity of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as primary and contemporary sources in greater detail.

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