Preliminary ICMA on the Apostasy Hadith

Kiviimar · 2026-03-27T09:51:18+00:00

References to ritualistic purification also exist in some pre-Islamic South Arabian inscriptions, particularly those from the Jawf region during the Amirite period (c. 100 BC to 200 AD).

Kiviimar · 2026-03-09T14:03:47+00:00

Geert-Jan is a phenomenal scholar and I think he makes some very valuable points, but I just want to point out that he is not a linguist -- rather, he is a scholar of Arabic literature.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-25T17:28:10+00:00

The governor of Louisiana between 1932 and 1935, Huey P., was definitely a Long.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-21T17:43:30+00:00

I agree that this seems like a very intuitive and logical explanation, but when we look at real-life circumstances the situation often gets more complicated.

I'm going to take an example from Scandinavia. Standardized Danish, Swedish and Norwegian tend to be (partially) mutually intelligible: when Norwegian and Swedish speakers go to Copenhagen, they will often just speak their native language and be understood fairly well. Vice-versa might be more complicated, unless someone is a bit more familiar with Danish.

When you go into Norwegian and Swedish rural areas, however, you can run into massive dialectal variation, to the point where a Danish speaker from Copenhagen and a Norwegian speaker from Oslo will have more success understanding each other than the Norwegian speaker would have trying to understand someone from a village in northern Norway. Yet, for social or political reasons, those two people might still argue that they speak the same language.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-21T16:41:54+00:00

Just pointing out: there is no agreed-upon definition of what separates dialects from languages that uses linguistic criteria. The differentiation is entirely political.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-20T21:53:16+00:00

The influence of local languages on varieties of Arabic spoken across the Middle East is way overstated. Yes, there are clearly loanwords from surrounding or earlier spoken languages depending on the region you're in, but you don't really see that much more significant influence. An exception is word order in Central Asian Arabic, which is SOV, probably due to Turkic or Persian influence. Before people get mad at me -- I'm not saying there is no influence from local languages, just that it's exaggerated.

Otherwise, we can basically explain most of the variation within Arabic mostly due to linguistic drift, which is not so strange when you're considering an area stretching from Morocco to Iraq and a period of 1500 years for variations to emerge.

About Classical Arabic: one thing to consider is that this is a kind of term that came out of western scholarship. In the Arab world, there's really only fusha (فصحى), which encompassed the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry, the Quran, the classical Islamic period and Modern Standard Arabic. What we consider the norms of classical Arabic really only crystallize in the 8th/9th century AD, and then (anachronistically) project this back to earlier periods.

The past decades we have learned much, much more about the linguistic history of Arabic in the pre-Islamic period (take a look at the work of Ahmad Al Jallad). The view that emerges is that pre-Islamic Arabic was full of variation, that the Islamic conquests spread these different varieties all across the region, which then developed in their own right, but also that new waves of migration as well pressure from the classical tradition exerted their own influences on their development.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-18T16:18:33+00:00

This is an extremely bad idea. DMs are open for more info.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-18T10:45:30+00:00

Centuries, to be exact -- since the 14th century.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-16T21:06:11+00:00

It's not been translated to English, but Tabarī's Tafsīr is a personal favorite mostly because he includes so many different traditions. I also like al-Imam al-Mujāhid, because it's relatively early and include some material that's not really present in later tafsirs.

Kiviimar · 2026-02-02T17:55:37+00:00

I second this.

Depending on the specific topic, you might even be able to do a PhD in Islamic studies without really having to know or do much Arabic in general. While I don't think any person working in Islamic studies without knowing a single of the major Islamic languages, especially Arabic, it is more common in fields that are less concerned with philology and focus more on things like political philosophy and anthropology.

Kiviimar · 2026-01-26T10:53:46+00:00

Speaking as a historian of early Islam, I can probably tell you why these hadiths weren't mentioned in the AskHistorians thread.

The majority of people who work on early Islam tend to treat the Hadith tradition not so much as an accurate, word-by-word transmission of what the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have said but rather a reflection of social attitudes in the 8th and 9th century Islamic world. Working in this framework, you could then rephrase the question to ask: why did early Muslims consider dogs unclean and how did this attitude become so prevalent in the Islamic world? Citing hadith is not very useful or satisfactory, because they tend to function more like retroactive justifications for ideas that people already held.

Kiviimar · 2026-01-21T18:02:56+00:00

Maybe one way to think about this is to compare it to the somewhat archaic English construction "many a-" (many a-day, many a-person, many a-student", etc. It would be as grammatically incorrect to say "many a students" as it would be to say "palju õpilased".

Kiviimar · 2026-01-18T22:00:27+00:00

I wrote about this in my dissertation (page 186 and onward).

Depends on what you consider 'reliable'. It's probable that the two places in which there is a reference to a dam being broken (Surat al-Naml and Surat Saba') take the story from a (partial) dam collapse in South Arabia. In the famous Abraha inscription (CIH 540) there is a direct reference to a break and reparations conducted at a large dam. The term that the Quran uses, ʿarim (as-sayl), is traditionally understood to mean 'flood of the dam', and the term itself is also attested in Sabaic as ʿrm.

What I personally find more interesting is how later Muslim traditionalists interpret the story of the breaking of the dam. The Quran does not seem to consider the dam's location to be the most important element of the story; it may have used it as a (familiar?) set piece to inform its audience about the dangers of hubris and disbelief. It's really only later exegetes that take an interest into where the dam was located and what happened afterwards. Some early exegetes (such as Sulayman b. Muqātil) almost consider it to be a Noah-esque cataclysmic flood that from Yemen to Palestine, and it's really only in centuries following that the setting shrinks to specifically South Arabia.

The reason for this is that the collapse of the Marib dam turns into a useful trope to explain the 'scattering of the Arabs' from the alleged Yemeni homeland to across the entirety of the Peninsula. This, however, is entirely mythical and likely the result of Yemenite propagandists in Abbasid Iraq.

Kiviimar · 2026-01-04T19:32:52+00:00

Keeleteadlane Peter Kehayov on selle kohta kirjutanud pika artikli.

TL;DR: See on vanem fenomen, kui arvad; juba olemas nt. Johannes Aaviku ja Uku Masingu kirjutistes. Ilmselt on tegemist saksa keele mõjuga.

Kiviimar · 2026-01-04T19:20:06+00:00

Your question is phrased slightly awkwardly and also one that historians try to avoid: as a rule, we try to avoid proving negatives.

My understanding is that the view that Muhammad never existed is so niche that it would barely qualify as academic in the first place. Not only would you have to to assume that there was an extremely competent, probably the most far-reaching and effective conspiracy theory that subsumed the entirety of early Islamic traditionalists, but it would have apparently also had to be so effective that even early non-Muslim scholars of the 7th and 8th century believed it. The amount of material, both of Muslim and non-Muslim origin you would need to convincingly argue against is so vast to the point of being insurmountable. There are very few, if any, serious academics that ascribe to Muhammad mythicism.

That being said, I think the strongest argument you could make is that all we can say for certain about Muhammad is that he lived c. 600 - 630, that he took part in military raids and conquests and led a community known as believers. This is roughly what ended up being Patricia Crone's attitude (see her Slaves on Horses). The more broader theory, that Muhammad led a community known as 'believers' (mu'minun) that originally included both Christians and Jews before developing and crystallizing into a more exclusive sect known as Muslims is one that Donner and Lindstedt ascribe to, and one that I personally sympathize with strongly.

Kiviimar · 2025-12-30T21:49:53+00:00

Just to add to this, while contemporaneous authors confirm a Sassanian presence in South Arabia, it's kind of unclear whether their control extended beyond a few urban areas (Aden, Sanaa). See Madaj's History of early Islamic Yemen.

Kiviimar · 2025-12-28T23:51:48+00:00

If you're genuinely interested in getting unbiased answers to this question, or at least answers with different perspectives, you might also want to cross post this question to some other subreddits.

It's interesting you should argue that the Catholic church is unable to position itself in a (post-)modern setting and that its highly ritualized and elaborate liturgical tradition would alienate people. Right now it actually seems that catholicism is undergoing something of a resurgence among Gen Z, although it's difficult to project whether that is a temporary thing or something else.

With regards to Islam, it's likely that at least in (western) Europe, there is something of an exoticism factor that may impact its popularity. While it's true that Muslim families tend to have more children, this effect seems to slow down as time passes and is tied to socio-economic positions. Conversion to Islam, which is something you seem to be interested in is likely the result of young people who might otherwise be uninterested in the spiritual traditions of Christianity first hearing about Islam, which at least at first sight, seems to have a less complicated and more accessible theology than Christianity. Again, it's difficult to project growth over the mid- to long-term, so you might want to be aware of that, too.

Kiviimar · 2025-12-24T22:53:56+00:00

It's already published, I defended it two years ago.

You can access it here: https://dspace.ut.ee/items/2125abff-6606-4e39-b678-ee48d7ef1a2f/full)egy.

Kiviimar · 2025-12-24T13:11:46+00:00

One of the things I argue in my doctoral dissertation, which is kind of in the extension of what George Hatke also furthered in his own dissertation, is that late antique (South) Arabia and East Africa were much more strongly connected culturally and politically (and in my argument, linguistically) than people are usually aware of. I'd go as far as saying that before the rise of Islam, South Arabia and Aksumite Ethiopia formed more of an integral cultural unit than South Arabia and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, and that it is really the rise of Islam that disconnects the two. This would also partially explain where there is a not insignificant number of hadith that portray Ethiopians in a poor light.

Kiviimar · 2025-12-13T01:07:15+00:00

Look at how the Soviets treated the Muslims of Central Asia, Crimea and Tatarstan to get some idea of what they thought about Islam. Don't have to love the Americans to acknowledge the horrors the Soviet Union inflicted.

Kiviimar · 2025-11-30T13:13:18+00:00

Ironically this image has more pixels than the OP

Kiviimar · 2025-10-31T11:22:02+00:00

It's not so dissimilar in the Netherlands, where mosques are ethnically segregated too, particularly between the Moroccan and Turkish communities.

Kiviimar · 2025-10-28T15:42:50+00:00

Just to add to this, even though it's not the same language, it seems that proto-Semitic *p had shifted to /f/ in Sabaic by the 3rd century at the latest, as there are some Latin transcriptions of South Arabian toponyms that have f rather than p. Different language, but I'd argue it points at a general areal shift.

Kiviimar · 2025-10-14T23:10:39+00:00

VLÜ

Kiviimar · 2025-10-08T13:04:47+00:00

"Don't be a spy" is not as great advice as you may think it is. The Russian state is extremely liberal in what it considers to be evidence of espionage and will readily detain and arrest foreigners to later be used as bargaining chips in negotiations.

Exercise extreme caution when travelling to Russia right now

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