This article reads Genesis 18-19 in the light of the principal of exchange at work in ancient religious belief concerning divine justice. Genesis 18.1-15 and 19.1-29, as examples of the well-worn tale of the divine visitor, are narrative expressions of confidence in a divine justice that rewards the kind and punishes the inhospitable. In the…[Read more]

his article looks at the repeated gnomic phrase in the Book of Qoheleth, “All is vanity and a chasing after wind” (NRSV) and reads it as a disjunctive parallelism in which the terms lbh and jwr denote mortality and the divine spirit, respectively, thus showing the sense of the phrase to be, “All is mortal, but strives for immortality”. Using R…[Read more]

A brief note about a manuscript preserved in the University of Michigan Library under the shelfmark Isl. Ms. 386.

Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam from the mid-1930s until 1975, wrote extensively about Adam, Moses, and Jesus. His qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ bear little resemblance to the older accounts in the Qurʾān and the Bible or to the traditional qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ material. His focus was his racialist mythology into which he placed appropriate r…[Read more]

During the first decades of the 20th century, Ottoman Turkish periodicals in Istanbul bore witness not only to great socio-political transformations, but also to vehement religious-intellectual discussions. At the end of 1921, one concrete example of the latter was a disputation concerning the birth, death, and miracles of Jesus between three…[Read more]

The cycles of revelation, community reception, and redemption embodied by the prophets of Islam form the substance of Islamic salvation history, a literary form that has not received due attention in comparison to the didactic and homiletic dimensions of the tales of the prophets. This article suggests that salvation history is an almost…[Read more]

Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is a premodern popular epic set in legendary prehistory that tells the story of how the Yemenite king Sayf leads his people on an exodus to the (then unpopulated) lands of Egypt, where he diverts the river Nile and founds a proto-Islamic Egyptian kingdom, then embarks on a military campaign to conquer the realms of h…[Read more]

This study analyzes the use of a qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ narrative in two secular homoerotic poems of desire (ʿishq) written by religious authority figures in Muslim Spain, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew. In the Arabic poem, by the Cordoban jurist Ibn Ḥazm (384–456/994–1064), the lover compares the scent of the clothes of his absent beloved to a qiṣaṣ a…[Read more]

This article is an exploration of how a fourth/tenth-century Muslim author makes ingenious use of radically extra-canonical and unusual narratives for the defense of serious theology. The theology in question is the occultation of the Twelfth Imām, a defining tenet of Twelver Shi’ism. The extra-canonical narratives, meanwhile, include a se…[Read more]

Rabbinic literature is often the starting point for those interested in locating intertexts and establishing relationships between Jewish and Islamic literature. Second Temple literature, however, echoes not only in medieval Jewish texts, but also in Islamic stories about the prophets. Moreover, the worldview underlying al-Kisāʾī’s Tales of the…[Read more]

This is a lightly edited version of the keynote address Professor Nagel originally intended to deliver at the conference “Islamic Stories of the Prophets: Semantics, Discourse, and Genre” (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, Naples, October 14–15, 2015). Although he was unable to attend the conference, he has graciously granted us permi…[Read more]