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Introduction
/ 691 ce.3 There, the Believers are called ahl alislm. The first definitely datable evidence of the usage
of the word muslimn, in the sense of adherents of
Islam, is from 123 ah / 741 ce,4 although it was probably used widely even before that.5 Thus, the change
from a community of Believers to [a] community of
Muslims6 was a rather slow one, at least appellationwise. Islam seems to have been a distinct religion from
early on,7 but it took some decades, if not more, for
its characteristics to become shaped.8 The Great, (i.e.,
ah
* I thank Jaakko Hmeen-Anttila, Robert Hoyland, Kaj hrnberg, and the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript of this
article for their discerning comments. They provided me with insights that I would have missed on my own.
1
Fred M. Donner, From Believers to Muslims: Confessional
Self-Identity in the Early Islamic Community, Al-Abhath 5051
(20022003): 953. See now also his Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA, 2010). It must be
noted that the Muslim sources of the first/seventh century are very
meagre and make it very difficult to reconstruct the use of the terms
discussed in this article.
2
As for islm, see Q. 3:19 and 5:3. Muslimn and islm appear
in different places in the Qurn, also in the context of the earlier
prophets, but I do not believe that the words are used elsewhere
as technical terms; they just mean submission to God. See further
C. Adang, Belief and Unbelief, and M. Arkoun, Islm, both
in The Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, ed. J. D. McAuliffe (Leiden,
20012006), 1:21826, 2:56770.
3
H. M. El-Hawary, The Second Oldest Islamic Monument
Known Dated A.H. 71 (A.D. 691) from the Time of the Omayyad
Calif Abd el-Malik ibn Marwan, JRAS (1932): 28993. The
tombstone can also be seen at http://www.islamic-awareness.org/
History/Islam/Inscriptions/abasa.html, accessed October 2014.
4
Solange Ory, Les graffiti umayyades de Ayn al-arr, Bulletin
du Muse de Beyrouth 20 (1967): 100.
5
See Appendix, below, which maps the usage of the words
muslimn, muminn, and muhjirn in the dwns of some
Umayyad-era poets.
6
To borrow Donners phrase, From Believers to Muslims.
7
At least it was thus seen by the non-Muslims who wrote on the
matter: Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey
and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on
Early Islam (Princeton, NJ, 1997).
8
To give an example, according to the Qurn the Believers
should pray two or three (not five) times a day in addition to holding night vigils. See Q. 2:238; 6:52; 7:204206; 11:114; 17:78
79; 18:28; 20:130; 24:58; 25:64; 50:39; 52:4849; 76:26; and G.
Bwering, Prayer, in The Encyclopaedia of the Qurn 4, 21928.
[JNES 74 no. 1 (2015)] 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 02229682015/7401001 $10.00. DOI: 10.1086/679624
67
second) fitna (6073 ah / 680692 ce)9 was instrumental in the development of the self-definition of the
new religious movement. Interestingly, the change towards Islam as we know it seems to have been initiated
to some extent by the Caliph in ijz, Ibn al-Zubayr.10
While there is clear evidence that the Arabs of the
nascent religion called themselves muminn, the
conquered non-Arabs did not use that designation.
Rather, they used for the Believers a word deriving
from the Arabic muhjirn, which became mhaggry
in Syriac and magaritai in Greek.11 The meaning of
the Arabic verb hjara, from which the participle is
derived, is two-fold: to move from town to town, i.e.,
to emigrate; or to move from desert to town, i.e.,
to become sedentary.12 The Arab soldiers emigrated
(made the hijra) after the conquests to the new garrison towns (amr, sing. mir), from which they continued their further conquests.13 Jihd/qitl, justified
war for the cause of God, was inseparably connected
with the hijra;14 the connection is already Qurnic
(e.g., 2:218, 8:74).15 First, the Believers needed to
conquer lands. Then, the conquered areas needed to
be populated with the Believers. In many stories of
early Muslim Arabs, conversion to Islam and hijra are
9
G. H. A. Juynboll, Date of the Great Fitna, Arabica 20
(1973): 14259.
10
Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 54954. Note the appearance of the
Prophet Muammad as rasl Allh on the coins minted at the
behest of Ibn al-Zubayrs governor of Bshpr, first attested in
66 ah /68586 ce: http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/
Islam/Coins/drachm1.html, accessed October 2014. The name
Muammad appearing without rasl Allh on some coins from
Palestine and Transjordan (dated tentatively to 64758 ce) is probably a reference to a local governor; see Clive Foss, Arab-Byzantine
Coins: An Introduction, with a Catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks
Collection (Washington, D.C., 2008), 34. The name Muammad,
without further qualifications, also occurs on early Arab-Sasanian
coins, one from Shrajn 38 ah /65859 ce, and one from Rayy
52 ah /67273 ce; see Heinz Gaube, Arabosasanidische Numismatik (Braunschweig, 1973), 36.
11
Hoyland, Seeing Islam, index, s.v. muhjirn, mhaggry,
and magaritai; Adbul-Massih Saadi, Nascent Islam in the Seventh
Century Syriac Sources, in The Qurn in its Historical Context, ed.
Gabriel Said Reynolds (London, 2008), 21722. The non-Arabs
also used other appellations for the Arabs that they had already used
for centuries, such as Araby, ayyy, Saracens, Sons of Hagar,
and Ishmaelites. But when they wanted to specify the early Muslim
Arabs from the Christian Arabs, they used mhaggry.
12
Al-Ql, Aml (Beirut, n.d.), 2:193.
13
Patricia Crone, The First-Century Concept of Hira, Arabica 41 (1994): 35287. See also Wilferd Madelung, Has the Hijra
Come to an End? Revue des tudes Islamiques 54 (1986): 22537.
14
Crone, The First-Century Concept of Hira, 364.
15
Ibid., 35253.
muminn
Arabic contemporary
epigraphic and other
documentary evidence
The Qurn
muhjirn,
or words
derived
therefrom
muslimn
X
X
is notoriously difficult (see Table 1).22 That the historical and other prose texts were composed (or at least
redacted) over one hundred years after the events in
question can also be seen from the fact that they call,
already from the time of the Prophet onwards, the
Believers Muslims, and their religion Islam. The
contemporary evidence (papyri, coins, inscriptions)
shows this to be something of an anachronism: only
the Qurn attests the appellations Islam and Muslims, which were, hence, rare and not the primary
ones used.
The name muhjirn is an early one and can be
found in dated documentary evidence, for instance
as magaritai in two Egyptian Greek-language papyri dated 642 and 643 ce.23 The term does not die
out easily, because it is still used in the Greek papyri
of Qurra b. Shark, governor of Egypt 9096 ah /
70914 ce.24 Arabic literary texts contain genuine vestiges of the past, however hard to detect, attesting the
appellation muhjirn, even if the names muminn
and muslimn are far more common; and even contemporary non-Arabic sources imply that the Arab
conquerors called themselves, among other things,
muhjirn.
Since Patricia Crone has already amassed a large
collection of evidence of the word hijra as an emigration to the garrison cities, I do not need to present here an all-encompassing list of occurrences of
22
Here we do not have to dwell on the historiographical problems. For a longer discussion, see Ilkka Lindstedt, The Transmission
of al-Madins Material: Historiographical Studies (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2013; also available online at http://
urn.fi/URN:ISBN:9789521094002), chapters 23.
23
Crone, The First-Century Concept of Hira, 359, no. 21.
24
Ibid., 362, no. 44.
Al on domesticity
and the helpers who followed him [scil. the Prophet] in the hour of
difficulty, where al-ladhna ittabahu qualifies the anr. In this
case, al-anr seem to be non-Medinese.
31
For a traditional view (with which I disagree), see M. al-
Faruque, Emigrants and Helpers, and Emigration, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurn 2:1423.
32
Cf. Lecker, The Constitution of Medina, who endeavors to
refute this claim.
33
Crone, The First-Century Concept of Hira, 35355.
34
Al-Dhahab, Tarkh al-Islm, ed. M. A. A (Beirut, 2005),
2:6.
35
Al-Baldhur, Ansb al-Ashrf, ed. A. A. al-Dr et al. (Beirut,
1978), 6/1:380.
36
Ibn Atham, Kitb al-Fut, ed. al-Sayyid Abd al-Wahhb
al-Bukhr (Hyderabad, 19681975), 1:54.
37
Al-Mubarrad, Kmil, ed. Muammad Ab l-Fal Ibrhm
(Cairo, n.d.), 3:337.
44
Ibn Askir, Tarkh Madnat Dimashq, ed. Umar al-Amraw
et al. (Beirut, 19952001), 9:142.
45
Al-abar, Tarkh, 1:2774.
46
The text is corrupt, reading qla d bn umar, which should
be emended to qla (al-)d li-bn umar.
47
Umar b. Shabba, Tarkh al-Madna al-Munawwara, ed. Fuhaym Muammad Shaltt (Jeddah, 1399 ah), 2:488.
48
For documentation, see the Appendix (below).
49
al-Faruque, Emigrants and Helpers, 14.
Conclusions
The documentary evidence suggests that the word
islm as a name for the new Arab religion only became
the most often-employed designation towards the end
of the first/seventh century. Before that, the members
of the new religious movement were most often known
as muminn, Believers. Other names that were used, if
rarely, included muslimn (attested in the Qurn and
later Arabic literature) and muhjirn, Emigrants
(attested in the contemporary non-Arabic documents
and later Arabic literature). The word muhjirn is
not always interchangeable with muminn, since the
former chiefly means the non-Bedouin Arab Believers.
Around the early second/eighth century, muhjirn
died out as a general appellation and muslimn won
the day, even over muminn.
Appendix: Umayyad Poetry
This Appendix maps the occurrences of the words
mumin(n) (excluding amr al-muminn, which appears often), muslim(n), and muhjir(n) (outside
the muhjirnanr dichotomy) in a small sample of
Umayyad poetry, namely the dwns of al-Akhal (d.
probably before 92 ah / 71011 ce ), al-Farazdaq (d. ca.
Also, Bashear, Apocalyptic and Other Materials, 173.
Madelung, Apocalyptic Prophecies in im, 16263. For
examples in Madelungs source material, see ibid., 16669.
71
David Cook, Moral Apocalyptic in Islam, Studia Islamica
86 (1997): 61, n. 89. Cf. Bashear, Apocalyptic and Other Materials, 182, who understands al-Andalus as a toponym.
69
70
Mumin(n): 19.
Muslim(n): 71, 176, 317.
Muhjir(n): none.
Al-Farazdaq, Dwn74
Mumin(n): 213, 475.
Muslim(n): 136, 140, 197, 198, 218, 244, 294, 299, 539,
546, 571, 578, 607, 620.
Muhjir(n): 191, 280.
Jarr, Dwn75
Mumin(n): 120.
Muslim(n): 65, 219, 237, 403, 606, 677, 702, 741, 770,
838, 897, 978, 1001.
Muhjir(n): 637, 783.
72
Early Arabic poetry has been used for studying history by, for
example, Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, Gods Caliph: Religious
Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge, 1986); Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Umayyad Panegyric and the Poetics of
Islamic Hegemony: al-Akhals Khaffa al-Qanu (Those That
Dwelt with You Have Left in Haste), Journal of Arabic Literature
28 (1997): 89122. Nadia Jamil, Caliph and Qub: Poetry as a
Source for Interpreting the Transformation of the Byzantine Cross
on Steps on Umayyad Coinage, in Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and
Early Islam II, ed. J. Johns (Oxford, 1999), 1157.
73
Ed. A. lin (reprint Beirut, 1969).
74
Ed. Al Fr (Beirut, 1987).
75
Ed. Numn Muammad Amn h (Cairo, n.d.). I am only
taking into account Jarrs poems, not the later commentary, prose
text, etc., that is part of his Dwn.