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]

The study of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, the Islamic tales of the prophets, has a distinguished pedigree in the Western academy, but much work remains to be done in the field. Although there have been numerous studies of individual prophetic figures over the last few decades, focused studies of specific works in the literary genre of qiṣaṣ have generally…[Read more]

This is the afterword to Volume 3 of Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations, “New Perspectives on Late Antique Iran and Iraq.”

Medieval Persianate local histories form a heterogeneous genre, but a trait these diverse texts share is that they perform a balancing act: they simultaneously respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, the ṣaḥābah (Companions of the Prophet), tābiʿūn (Successors of the Companions), Alids,…[Read more]

This paper argues that the famous conqueror of al-Andalus, Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, who originally came from ʿAyn al-Tamr, a town under the hegemony of Naṣrid al-Ḥīrah, transmitted aspects of Sasanian administrative practice to al-Andalus and hence to Europe, as evidenced by the taxation terms tasca and kafiz attested in Latin and Romance texts. This spec…[Read more]

The Islamic conquest of the Sasanian Empire inaugurated, among many other transformations, the progressive Islamization of the region. The pace and mechanisms of this transformation remain poorly understood. Yet the progress of Islamization in the capital province of the Abbasid caliphate is a significant hidden variable in the study of Muslim…[Read more]

This essay focuses on two anti-Jewish chapters from the ninth-century Zoroastrian apologetic-polemical book called the Doubt-Dispelling Exposition (Škand Gumānīg Wizār). This book represents the earliest sustained engagement of Zoroastrianism with Judaism and Jewish texts. Through a close analysis of the text, this essay demonstrates how the aut…[Read more]

The study of the Sasanian Empire has gradually been incorporated into Late Antique Studies. The inclusion of a territory that was originally marginal to this area of scholarship is by most accounts a positive development, though it is one that should be carefully considered. One means of evaluating the significance of this development is by…[Read more]

This essay discusses the shifts brought on the Iranian Plateau by the founder of the Sasanian Empire, Ardaxšīr ī Pābagān, in the third century CE. I contend that these structural changes in rule, religion, physical boundaries, and political propaganda ushered in a new period in Iranian and Middle Eastern history that coincides with the period of L…[Read more]