The Problem of the Quranic al-ṣamad - Part 5
On the meaning of Sura 112 and the Quranic conception of God
Modern Islamic scholarship’s changing approach to ṣamad
In one of the first major studies of the problem of ṣamad, Franz Rosenthal showed how “eternal” and “everlasting” had come to acquire a position of dominance as its preferred rendering in translations of the Quran into various languages since the seventeenth century. Rosenthal traced this to André du Ryer’s 1647 French version, but he noted that this consensus emerged against an earlier tradition of translating the word in terms of a “tough, solid material,” such as Abū Qurra’s sphuropēktos.[1] The understanding of ṣamad as solid has residues, too, in its modern Arabic meaning of firmness and resolution, as well as the modern Turkish somut, meaning “concrete” as the antonym of “abstract.”[2]
That said, there have been two broad trends within modern scholarship, one looking to both the Islamic tradition and Semitic philology to uncover the intention behind ṣamad within a traditional Arabian context, and a second, to which Neuwirth belongs, of considering it within the context of Muslim rejection of the Trinity. Most assume, as Köbert did in arguing that ṣamad expresses the biblical concept of God as a rock, that the word’s origin provides an explanation of meaning in its quranic context. Rosenthal, for example, looked to al-Ṭabarī as the baseline for understanding the attitude of the Islamic tradition, reducing the latter’s evidence further to three basic meanings: solid, enduring, and lordship.[3] Applying hadith criticism, he rejected “enduring” because of chains of transmission that were too short to go back to Qatāda ibn al-Nuʿmān (d. 644) and rejected “solid” as making no sense.[4] Rather than investigate the incongruity of the statements on solid, he chose lordship, seeing justifications for that in philology. Among his evidence, Rosenthal cited cognates of the root ṣ-m-d in early Arabic poetry, both al-Ṭabarī’s and al-Masʿūdī’s (d. 956) mention of an idol of the quranic tribe ʿĀd with the name ṣamūd, and the consonantal root’s presence in Ugaritic, Punic, and Hebrew as an object belonging to the storm god Baʿal or a divine name in itself.[5] Thus, he concluded, ṣamad is the relic of an old Northwest Semitic religious term that confused Muslim commentators and possibly the quranic author too.[6] Gordon Newby took a similar approach, citing Cyrus Gordon’s work on ancient Semitic languages and Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 1312) dictionary to speculate that Muḥammad appealed to a pre-Islamic deity called Allāh al-ṣamad when addressing Jews and pagans in Mecca in order to establish worship of Allāh as a new deity.[7]
Assuming firm connections between the text and a Meccan audience, Uri Rubin developed further the idea of an Arabian origin for ṣamad that was comprehensible during the period of the prophetic mission. Rubin extracted citations from across the early Islamic literary genres to argue that the word was familiar to Arabic speakers of the Hijaz through verbal usages (yaṣmud, maṣmūd, muṣammad) and phrases, such as al-rabb al-ṣamad and al-sayyid al-ṣamad related to objects and places of worship. For example, he noted the presence of the verb in the tribal war material of Umayyad poets Jarīr and Farazdaq, as related by Basran philologist Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā (d. ca. 822–828) in Kitāb al-Naqāʾiḍ, where it appears to describe a warrior setting out with the intent to challenge his adversary.[8] It also comes up in a range of poetic and other material of the Abbasid era, such as Kitāb al-Aghānī (where Laylā al-Akhyaliyya tells the Umayyad Basran governor al-Ḥajjāj that only the caliph and al-mustaghfar al-ṣamad are above him);[9] the hadith collections of Abū Dāwūd (d. 889) and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (lā yaṣmud lahu ṣamdan, meaning that a tree or column was not the object of the Prophet’s prayer if they happened to be in front of him while praying);[10] the grammarian al-Mubarrad (d. 898) (a poet addresses the caliph al-Mutawakkil, telling him that no one is above him except al-wāḥid al-ṣamad; also al-ṣamd min al-arḍ appears with the apparent meaning of high land, or plateau, in a report from the companion Ibn ʿAbbās, providing a possible link to the pre-Islamic epigraphic citations from North Arabia);[11] the genealogist al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār (d. 870);[12] and early sīra or tafsīr material such as that of Muqātil, beyond his explication of Q 112.[13] The problem is that most of these usages could easily reflect the late Umayyad and Abbasid impulse to explain and normalize obscure quranic language, including projecting it onto the pre-Islamic era.[14] They do not prove that a Hijazi quranic audience was familiar with the term as an epithet of God, even if epigraphy suggests pre-Islamic northwest Arabian communities used the word in a devotional context.[15]
However, scholarship began to shift focus away from philology toward contextual meaning.[16] Van Ess acknowledged the anti-Nicene dogma of the sura, but abstained from discussing al-ṣamad’s meaning to opt instead for a review of the anthropomorphic milieu of early Muslim Iraq as an explanation for the tradition’s references to solidity, eating, and drinking.[17] Rudi Paret noted that the tafsīr offering of solid (kompakt) is commensurate with the broader quranic argument against the Trinity in favor of an indivisible (unteilbar) God: God was solid in that he was not divisible into three.[18] Although some outliers such as Arne Ambros continued to reject this thinking, arguing ṣamad is a poetic ornamentation inserted for reasons of rhyme with no theological significance of its own (nur die Rolle einer Art Epitheton ornans),[19] the trinitarian context continued to attract attention before Neuwirth. In an article published in 1998 in Turkish, and then in 2006 in German, Mehmet Paçacı argues the verse should be read as a commentary that “makes reference to debates over tawḥīd throughout the history of the Semitic religious tradition.”[20] Sura 112 is “a response, even an objection” (bir cevap, hatta bir itiraz) to literal understandings of figurative references to God that had taken hold within the monotheistic tradition, such as that God, then later Jesus, is a rock and a refuge for the believer.[21] Still, mindful perhaps of Western tropes of the Prophet as mere imitator, implied in the discourse of influence and borrrowing,[22] Paçacı argues that the verses reflect thinking emerging independently from the religious discourse of late antiquity.[23] In Neuwirth’s view, this meant Paçacı had stopped short of understanding the passage as intertextual criticism,[24] or in terms of what has also been called the Quran’s “hypertextuality.”[25]
Conclusion
From this overview of evidence and interpretation, three aspects to the problem of ṣamad stand out: its meaning in pre-quranic Arabic, its function and intent in the Quran, and the question of later understandings. Regarding the first point, although there are grounds to consider some of the poetic material regarding ṣamad as post-quranic, the epigraphic evidence suggests that Arabic-speaking audiences of the Hijaz and Levant could have recognized the word, even if the specific grammatical and lexical form was new to their ears. Given this familiarity it seems unlikely that the Syriac cognate or other non-Arabic resonances would have entered the semantic field of the listener. The Quran uses many words only recently naturalized into Arabic or even deployed ex nihilo, words that would have been understood intellectually by an inner circle while producing a purely magical effect for those on the outside.[26] A nontechnical term like ṣmīdā does not appear to be one of them, even if Syriac often provides the answer to problems of obscure quranic terminology.[27] Unlike the use of ṣibgha in Q 2:138[28] or al-raqīm in Q 18:9,[29] no lexeme has been identified in Greek, Syriac, or other pre-Islamic literatures that allows us to construct a morphological-semantic genealogy of ṣamad. However, Neuwirth’s proposal regarding the Nicene creed, and previous work on ṣamad’s pre-Islamic history in Semitic languages, including Arabic, allow for the suggestion that the word’s occurrence in the Quran marks the convergence of two trajectories: a morphological one in an Arabian religious milieu and a semantic one in the theological-philosophical discourse of late antiquity.
Regarding function and intent, the issue is complicated by the continuing questions regarding the Quran as a historical document. The scholarly consensus has shifted toward accepting the traditional narrative of its compilation under ʿUthmān, but the possibility of final editing during the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik is still held up by some, which could support the theory of Q 112’s later insertion.[30] Critical questions remain on issues such as authorship (single or multiple),[31] date of composition of suras and pericopes (during or beyond Muḥammad’s lifetime),[32] composite or unified nature of the text, intended audience at time of composition, location of composition,[33] message and function (e.g., the apocalyptic material),[34] evolving status of the text (lectionary, God’s speech, waḥy, tanzīl), and the extent to which authorial intent was known to others. Yet it seems reasonsable to conclude that ṣamad has been deployed in an innovative manner that moves beyond any pre-quranic meanings in some communities. Neuwirth has gone further than other scholars in imagining the sura to be the inter- or hypertextual reformulation of Jewish and Christian creedal statements in a concise corrective format. This format would be propagandized as a key slogan of state ideology during the critical period of political and social change in the late 600s, whose long-term effect was the production of Arabic-speaking Muslims from the cultural and linguistic multiplicity of Eastern Christianity.[35]
However, the textual work put into ṣamad to convey the all-powerful character of God, which is already stated in numerous formulae throughout the Quran, would seem like an opportunity missed, while equating the Nicene homoousia with the “equal” of sura 112:4 would be to valorize the homo at the expense of the ousia. It makes more sense to see ṣamad as addressing the question of God’s material nature as expressed in the long and often bloody debate in theological and philosophical circles over the concept of ousia, which was central to trinitarian ideology. The logic of sura 112 could then be expressed as follows: if he did not beget (112:3), if he was not begotten (112:3), and if he has no equal (112:4), then God is not only one (112:1), he is ontologically unique (112:2): he is al-ṣamad. Otherwise put, two short basic statements (he is one, he is unique) are followed by two further statements in elaboration of the first (he did not give birth and was not begotten) and the second (there is no other entity of his type). In other words, al-ṣamad means what the sura tells us it means, since the sura serves to provide the definition of a concept with this innovative term.[36] Rather than ornamental afterthought, al-ṣamad forms the sura’s central axis, both structurally and ideologically. Sura 112 gets to the heart of the theological logic at work in Islamic tawḥīd[37] and the “doctrinal re-articulation” taking place in the quranic text.[38] We now know that God is not only one but a genus apart. Expressing transcendence in this manner, among the other quranic epithets of God al-ṣamad is perhaps most synonymous with al-ʿaliyy (2:255, 22:62, 31:30, 34:23, 40:12, 42:4, paired with al-kabīr and al-ʿaẓīm).[39] When Aristotle wrote in Categories that the primary ousiai are “the things by reference to which we explain why other things exist, but whose existence itself stands in no need of explanation,” he expressed the ontology that would later embody the quranic conception of God, upon which has been enacted a simple transformation, in contrast to the work done by Christian theologians and Neoplatonic philosophers: there is only one primary ousia, which has no extensions.[40] Considering the dogmatic intricacies driving the rival sects of the period, the Hijazi reformers were doing believers a service in propagating this relatively uncomplicated message,[41] which was contrasted explicitly in the Dome of the Rock to the schismatic knowledge of the Christians.[42]
On the question of reception—although later Muslim writers were fundamentally ignorant of authorial intent in general, residues of truth were neverthless deposited within the tradition and modern hadith scholarship has tried to elucidate some means of detecting them. Most of the ṣamad hadith conform to Joseph Schacht’s point regarding dogmatic reports: their early nature is manifested in the use of terse, decontextualized statements and the fact that they have not been subjected to post-Shafiʿi dating back to the Prophet.[43] At issue is how information from the period of quranic composition was transmitted among an expanding community of believers against a backdrop of evolution in the text’s status for both the faithful and the state. Knowledge of sura 112 held by an inner circle among the first generation of Muslims appears to have been memorialized in short statements regarding the ousia of the divinity upon whom all creation depends.[44] The disembodied character of these reports was evidently cryptic and confusing to Abbasid-era writers living in a dramatically changed political, social, and intellectual environment. Arabic provided cognates for understanding a word like ṣamad, but it came in a lexical form alien to them. As thinking about the nature of the text continued to develop, many began to flesh out the meaning of ṣamad around concepts of the eternal and everlasting creator, among other names of God.
Through the state project of ʿAbd al-Malik, a growing segment of both Muslim and Christian society was positioned to acquire an intimate familiarity with the Quran after it had remained for several decades the privileged knowledge of a small intellectual elite. Indeed, Nicolai Sinai has proposed this as an explanation for the apparent ignorance in early Islamic legal circles of some quranic stipulations noted by Joseph Schacht and Patricia Crone.[45] In rendering ṣamad as indivisible matter, theologians such as Abū Qurra were acting on insight gleaned from Muslim informants about Muslim thinking regarding the taxonomical nature of God[46]—that the unique God was, as Byzantinist Jean Darrouzès wrote in 1972, “d’un seul bloc, d’une seule pièce, sans aucun élément surajouté à la masse.”[47] Yet ṣamad’s inspiration in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic language of the Trinity was almost certainly lost on the translators of trinitarian and Greek thought into Arabic in the early Abbasid period, when ousia was rendered first with jawhar and tabīʿa, neither of which appeared in the Quran, and later with dhāt.[48] For this reason, none among them thought to reach for ṣamad as a word pertinent to Greek ousia.
[1] F. Rosenthal, “Some Minor Problems in the Qurʾān,” in The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume: Studies in History and Philology, ed. J. Starr (New York: Conference on Jewish Relations, 1953), 69–84, at 72. In a thirteenth-century translation, Los Bocados de Oro, of Egypt-based philosopher Mubashshir ibn Fātik’s Mukhtār al-ḥikam wa-maḥāsin al-kalim (1048f.), in which Ibn Fātik says Socrates called on people to worship al-wāḥid al-ṣamad ([Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya, 1980], 85), it was translated as el durable.
[2] Ottoman dictionaries listed both ṣūm (solid; yekpare, bütün ve içi dolu) and ṣamad (the eternal, independent God, who requires no person or thing), but their single origin seems clear; Ş. Sami, Kamus-ı türki, 7th ed. (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1996), 832, 842. Ṣūm may have acquired the -ut ending through the Turkish language reforms; New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary (Istanbul: Redhouse Press, 1968), 1027.
[3] Rosenthal, “Some Minor Problems,” 67–84.
[4] Ibid., 80.
[5] Ibid., 82. Baal was referred to as Baʿal-ṣmd (god of the mace) in the Ugaritic texts known as the Baal Cycle; see C. H. Gordon, “Azitawadd’s Phoenician Inscription,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 8.2 (1949): 108–15, at 115; and W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 233. The name ṣmd il was also in use; see C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965), 474. For al-Ṭabarī, see his Annales, ed. M. J. de Goeje, 16 vols. (repr. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964–65) 1:231, 241; and for al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, 9 vols. (Paris: Société asiatique, 1861–77), 3: 295.
[6] Rosenthal, “Some Minor Problems,” 83.
[7] G. D. Newby, “Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: A Reconsideration,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty Fifth Birthday, ed. H. A. Hoffner (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1973), 127–30; Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kubrā al-Mīriyya, 1883–91), 3–4: 246–47.
[8] U. Rubin, “Al-Ṣamad and the High God: An Interpretation of sūra CXII,” Der Islam 61 (1984): 197–217, at 200, 203. Abū ʿUbayda says that Arabian families (al-ʿarab) referred to their nobles using terms such as al-sayyid al-ṣamad, for which he cited the Umayyad Kufan poet al-Kumayt ibn Zayd al-Asadī as evidence. See F. Sezgin, ed., Majāz al-Qurʾān, 2 vols. (Cairo: al-Khānjī, 1970), 2: 316.
[9] Rubin, “Al-Ṣamad,” 203.
[10] Ibid., 201.
[11] Ibid., 204.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 201. Relating the Islamic story of an invasion of Mecca by the Himyarite ruler Abraha in his explanation of Q 105:1, Muqātil cites a verse from Muḥammad’s grandfather describing the Kaʿba as al-bayt al-ḥaram al-maṣmūd; Muqātil, Tafsīr, 3: 522.
[14] For example, the phrase al-rabb al-ṣamad—which bears a clear resemblance to Allāh al-ṣamad—appears in a pre-Islamic talbiya, but the talbiya also contains the quranic phrase al-wāḥid al-qahhār; cited in Rubin, “Al-Ṣamad,” 205. See also M. J. Kister, “Labbayka, Allāhumma, Labbayka . . . : On a Monotheistic Aspect of a Jāhiliyya Practice,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 33–57, at 54. Arne Ambros made the same criticism of Rubin; A. A. Ambros, “Die Analyse von Sure 112: Kritiken, Synthesen, neue Ansätze,” Der Islam 63 (1986): 219–47, at 238–39.
[15] On Uri Rubin and Arabian origins, see G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 20–44.
[16] The trinitarian connection was rejected by earlier scholarship. See W. M. Watt, “Belief in a ‘High God’ in Pre-Islamic Mecca,” Journal of Semitic Studies 16.1 (1971): 35–40; Cl. Schedl, “Probleme der Koranexegese: Nochmals ṣamad in Sure 112,2,” Der Islam 58.1 (1981): 1–14; G. Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur’ān (London: Sheldon Press, 1965), 126.
[17] Van Ess, “Youthful God.”
[18] R. Paret, “Der Ausdruck ṣamad in Sure 112,2,” Der Islam 56 (1979): 294–95.
[19] Ambros, “Die Analyse,” 226–27, 243–44.
[20] Mehmet Paçacı, “De Ki Allāh ‘Bir’dir’: Aḥad/æhâd: Sami Dini Geleneği Perspektifinden İhlas Sûresi’nin Bir Tefsiri Denemesi,” Islâmiyât 1.3 (1998), 49–71, at 51 (in German: “Sag: Gott ist ein einziger—aḥad/aehad: Ein exegetischer Versuch zu Sure 112 in der Perspektive der semitischen Religionstradition,” in Alter Text–neuer Kontext: Koranhermeneutik in der Türkei heute, ed. F. Körner [Freiburg: Herder, 2006], 166–203).
[21] Paçacı, “De Ki Allāh,” 55–58.
[22] Melchert, Before Sufism, 12–13.
[23] Paçacı, “De Ki Allāh,” 64–65, 71.
[24] Neuwirth, Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 477 n. 87.
[25] Dye, “Qurʾān and Its Hypertextuality”.
[26] Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary, 39: the Prophet liked to “puzzle his audience with these new terms.”
[27] For example, Q 77:14’s fa-l-fāriqāt farqan makes sense when understood as a calque on the Syriac pārūqā (savior); El-Badawi, Qurʾān, 182. On the Syriac turn in quranic studies, see Mohsen Goudarzi, “Peering behind the Lines,” Harvard Theological Review 113 (2020): 421–35, esp. 430–34, and Abdulla Galadari’s review of D. Beck, “Evolution of the Early Qur’ān: From Anonymous Apocalypse to Charismatic Prophet,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 30.4 (2019): 523–24.
[28] J. Cole, “Dyed in Virtue: The Qurʾān and Plato’s Republic,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 61 (2021): 580–604.
[29] M. Shaddel, “Studia Onomastica Coranica: al-Raqīm, Caput Nabataeae,” Journal of Semitic Studies 62.2 (Autumn 2017): 303–18.
[30] A solid early attestation of the name ʿAbd al-Ṣamad could help settle the matter. In favor of early Quran codification, see B. Sadeghi and U. Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the Prophet,” Arabica 57 (2010): 343–436; also N. Sinai, “When Did the Consonantal Skeleton of the Qurʾān Reach Closure? Part II,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77.3 (2014): 509–21. Those challenging include S. Shoemaker, Creating the Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Study (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2022) and Dye, “Qurʾān and Its Hypertextuality”.
[31] B. Sadeghi, “The Chronology of the Qurʾān: A Stylometric Research Program,” Arabica 58 (2011): 210–99; El-Badawi, Qurʾān, 18–19; Cl. Gilliot, “Reconsidering the Authorship of the Qur’ān: Is the Qur’ān Partly the Fruit of a Progressive and Collective Work?” in The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context, ed. G. S. Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2008), 88–108; and Dye, “Qurʾān and Its Hypertextuality,” 17–19.
[32] Dye, “Qurʾān and Its Hypertextuality”; T. Tesei, “The Qurʾān(s) in Context(s),” Journal Asiatique 309.2 (2021): 185–202.
[33] On references to olive cultivation, see P. Crone, “How Did the Quranic Pagans Make a Living?” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 68.3 (2005): 387–99.
[34] S. Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 116–79.
[35] While Muḥammad’s relationship to God is the subject of the Dome of the Rock’s outer inscriptions, the inner inscriptions clarify Jesus’s status as the Messiah, messenger of God, God’s word, and “a spirit from him.”
[36] Early Quran transmitters give Q 112:3–4 as the definition of 112:2; al-Dīnawarī, Tafsīr, 2: 526, and Mujāhid, Tafsīr, ed. M. ʿA. Abū al-Nīl (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-Islāmī al-Ḥadītha, 1989), 760.
[37] The titles of al-tawḥīd and al-ikhlāṣ seem to reveal an intent behind sura 112 as a summa theologica, a summation of faith (like the Shmaʿ and Nicene creed). The other such statement, lā ilāha illā Allāh, appears twice in the Quran (37:35, 47:19) and lā ilāha illā huwa (or anā) appears in numerous other verses; its linkage with the phrase Muḥammad rasūl Allāh comes in the Dome of the Rock inscriptions, and more tangentially in Q 7:158.
[38] Emran El-Badawi’s phrase, Qurʾān, 213.
[39] God is not described as al-aḥad in the Quran, but he is six times al-wāḥid al-qahhār (12:39, 13:16, 14:48, 38:65, 39:4, 40:16).
[40] M. J. Loux, Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z and H (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008), 2, 92.
[41] Christian clergies were sensitive to this point: See Stephen of Ramla, Jāmiʿ wujūh al-īmān (written 877), discussed in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 230–31. Also S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008), 57–60.
[42] The inner wall reiterates Quranic language asserting that Jesus was a messenger and a word and spirit conveyed by God to Mary, before ending with Q 3:19, including those who squabble (ikhtalafa) over scripture. The same pericope comes in 42:14 using tafarraqū instead. Both verses are attested in the Sanaa Codex upper text.
[43] J. Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 350; idem, “A Reevaluation of Islamic Traditions,” in Ḥadīth: Origins and Developments, ed. H. Motzki (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 143–54, esp. 149–50; H. Motzki, “Introduction,” in ibid., xlv. On recent scholarship, A. K. Reinhart, “Juynbolliana, Gradualism, the Big Bang, and Ḥadīth Study in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.3 (2010): 413–44.
[44] On the simultaneous oral and written nature of early hadith and the culture of memorization, see G. Schoeler, “Oral Torah and Ḥadīth: Transmission, Prohibition of Writing, Redaction,” in Motzki, Ḥadīth, 67–108.
[45] N. Sinai, “When Did the Consonantal Skeleton of the Qurʾān Reach Closure? Part I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77.2 (2014): 288–92.
[46] On this phenomenon during the first 150 years more broadly, see Hoyland, Seeing Islam, 591–92.
[47] J. Darrouzès, “Tomos inédit de 1180 contre Mahomet,” Revue des études byzantines 30.1 (1972): 187–97, at 191.
[48] See S. L. Husseini, Early Christian-Muslim Debate on the Unity of God: Three Christian Scholars and Their Engagement with Islamic Thought (9th Century C.E.) (Leiden: Brill, 2014); H. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 304–54; J. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 102–8, 128; and Brock, “Secondary Formations,” 34.