We Are the Grass

Doug Metzger (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History, episode 129, We Are the Grass.

In this program, we will bring our present season on early Islamic history to a conclusion. Consider what we've learned over the past 40 hours or so, and get a sense of what's coming next. We have now completed all of the Abrahamic scriptures in our podcast. We've spent some time learning about the history behind the Tanakh, the New Testament and the Quran. We've read other texts very important to the history of the Abrahamic religions, like the Talmud, the works of the Church Fathers and the Hadiths. And just as importantly, we have explored the history of the non-Abrahamic world that unfolded as the Bible and the Quran were set down. We've heard other stories in Literature and History, but the story of what we might call Abrahamism has been the longest one of all. Now, it's time for us to look back on the long journey that we've taken through the Abrahamic scriptures and the civilizations from which they came and to draw some general conclusions about them.

I have wanted to write and record this episode for ten years, and I hope you'll enjoy walking this final mile with me. Crossing the finish line, in other words, knowing the actual contents of the Bible and the Quran and the immense history behind both of them, crossing that finish line is something to be proud of. So, let's begin.

Once upon a time, in the rugged place where Africa collides with Asia and Europe, there were three sisters.

The oldest sister was Jewish. The youngest sister was an Arab. The middle sister was also Jewish, although she stopped going to synagogue, and eventually nearly forgot her own roots. Forgetting things unfortunately ran in the family, because the three sisters would often forget that they were sisters, in spite of all the evidence around them. When they met, all too often, they tended to argue even though they were kindred, and had much more in common than not. The oldest sister was intimidating to her younger sisters, because she'd been around the longest. The youngest sister was intimidating too, because she was strong and practical, and had been successful from a very young age. The middle sister, over her long life, looked at her older sister and her younger sister with exasperation, feeling like no matter how much she had done in the world, a lot of it still just ignored her. Thus, they lived out their lives alternately bickering and trying to ignore one another, and occasionally exchanging polite salutations when the circumstances were just right. But at moments when the tensions between them were severe, even in their conflicts, they displayed their similarities, because again, they were and always would be family, and their names were Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

We learned about the older two sisters a while ago, but over these past 20 episodes and 40 hours, we've learned about the youngest Abrahamic religion, where Islam came from in the greater world of late antiquity, its prophet, its sacred scripture, and the story of how it brought a small band of West Arabian townspeople to control the largest empire Earth had yet known. Let's take a moment now to look back across the blockbuster three centuries of Middle Eastern history that we've covered in this past season, and remember how the youngest sister of Abrahamism came into the world and changed it forever.

As someone who has taught a lot of religious history, there are sentences I never get tired of saying. One of them is, The Bible is an anthology of documents from different historical periods. Again, The Bible is an anthology of documents from different historical periods. It's not a critical or incendiary declaration. It's just crisply accurate, a simple baseline statement of fact about a book that is too often presented as some monolithic block of ideology rather than, if you will allow me once again, an anthology of documents from different historical periods. And speaking of snappy sentences that sum up a lot of surprisingly seldom understood history, I also have one about Mecca in the year 570, when the Prophet of Islam was born. That sentence is quote, Mecca, in the year Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city, where there were polytheists and monotheists, close quote. In our contemporary world, in which Muslims often think of pre-Islamic Arabia as Al-Jahiliya, or the period of ignorance before Islam, and non-Muslims think of Mecca and just vaguely picture a desert somewhere, it's good to remember once again that quote, Mecca, in the year Muhammad was born there, was a late antique Eurasian city, where there were polytheists and monotheists, close quote.