COBHUNI Lecture: The Rise of Islam in a Judaeo-Christian ContextLecture of Jonathan E. Brockopp, Pennsylvania State University
29 June 2017
COBHUNI Lecture on Thursday, June 29 at 6 pm c.t. in room 136, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
The Rise of Islam in a Judaeo-Christian Context
Islam was born into a vibrant religious world, and the Qur'an itself addresses people of many faiths directly. But it is not often appreciated that non-Muslims (e.g. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians) remained in the majority for centuries. Furthermore, modern researchers have had a difficult time understanding the role of this multi-religious environment on the development of Muslim institutions, partly because both literary accounts and also the material evidence can be misleading. In this talk, I look specifically at the rise of the scholarly class (the ʿulamāʾ) during the first two hundred years of Islam. I will argue that communities of scholars arose only at the end of the second/eighth century, after a gradual process of differentiation from both Jewish scholars and from the Umayyad bureaucracy.