Read For Free Before And After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused Drafted By Garth Fowden Issued As Hardbound

have no idea what this book is about, Seriously. First, it's more historiography than history and not knowing all of the historians, ancient and modern, well, I was lost.
Second, so many names of people and places were thrown at me out of context that I got more lost.
Very specialized. Don't recommend for anyone but historiographers of ancient history, Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it, Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century.
"Before and After Muhammad" suggests a new way of thinking about the historical relationship between the scriptural monotheisms, integrating Islam into European and West Asian history.


Garth Fowden identifies the whole of the First Millenniumfrom Augustus and Christ to the formation of a recognizably Islamic worldview by the time of the philosopher Avicennaas the proper chronological unit of analysis for understanding the emergence and maturation of the three monotheistic faiths across Eurasia.
Fowden proposes not just a chronological expansion of late Antiquity but also an eastward shift in the geographical frame to embrace Iran.


In "Before and After Muhammad," Fowden looks at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside other important developments in Greek philosophy and Roman law, to reveal how the First Millennium was bound together by diverse exegetical traditions that nurtured communities and often stimulated each other.
.FVery difficult book to read, However, after muscling through it I found that his argument in general is pretty interesting, As the author points out, historians telling the story of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East tend to cut off aroundorAD, convieniently just before the rise of Islam.
Meanwhile, Islamic historians telling their own story tend to start with the life of the Prophet and ignore everything that went before, so they begin aroundAD.
The result is that both sides tell a story of rupture, as if there was a clean break between the ancient world and the new Islamic civilization, with no common ground between the two.
The author aims to reframe the story by looking at the periodCE as a whole, which reveals far more continuity than rupture, since the ideas of ancient Greece and ancient Iran continued to inform the newer Islamic civilization, and many other common threads remained as well, particularly in the way Christians and Jews living under Islam served as a bridge between the ancient world and the new.


The story this book tells begins with the emergence of Christianity under the Roman emperor Augustus, and ends with the synthesis of Greek philosophy with Islamic theology and science by Ibn Sina aroundCE.
In the process, it follows the development of several parallel and often intersecting threads: Aristotelian logic, Roman law, rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Iranian classical religion, and Islam.
In particular, it shows how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers each engaged with Greek philosophy to sharpen and enrich the arguments of their own traditions, as well as to interact with each other through the mediating force of philosophy.
This all came together in the debating salons of Baghdad aroundCE, at a time when both Christians and Jews were playing an active role in bringing the philosophy of ancient Greece into the Islamic domain, whether as translators of ancient Greek texts or as practitioners of Aristotelian logic.


The theme of this book could be summed up in three words: "continuity not rupture, " The author shows decisively how Islam emerged, not from a vacuum, but from a rich stew of competing beliefs that were the mark of the Near East in the late classical era.
Indeed, these beliefs continued to operate on and inform the evolving Islamic thoughtworld in the centuries to come, Thus, the author persuasively argues that any historian hoping to understand the

revolutionary changes of that time must bridge the gap between East and West, between ancient and modern, between Islam and its older cousins, Judaism and Christianity.


In the past, I've been frustrated at how completely Islam disappears from Eurocentric tellings of history, skipping from the ancient world to the Renaissance as if Islam never happened or was completely irrelevant to the story, which couldn't be further from the truth.
The author goes a long way toward "filling the hole where Islam should be" and he brings an amazing range of erudition to the task, moving easily from philosophy to theology to law to medeival science, with source materials in ancient Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew and Arabic.
I already know Garth Fowden's work from his earlier book The Egyptian Hermes, already a classic in its field, so I'm delighted to find that he is the one to tackle this far more ambitious and pressing task and light the way for future researchers.
His writing is aimed mainly at specialists or at least serious amateurs like myself but it is intelligble, extremely well documented and persuasively argued.
You can't go wrong with this author so if the subject interests you as a student of comparative religion, the Near East, or ancient and medieval history, by all means invest your time in this book because it's sure to pay off.
Garth Lowther Fowden, is British historian, Since, he has been Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at the University of Cambridge, .