ARABI - Arabs Recount Arabia before Islam - Part III

The ARABI (Arabs Recount Arabia Before Islam) series aims to investigate the narration about pre-Islamic Arabia built in the Arab-Muslim Tradition, and compare it, whence possible, with the historical data desumed from direct (epigraphy, archaeology) and external sources. Each volume introduced some short tales, both in Arabic original and English translation, as examples of how the Tradition itself recorded and re-narrated events and characters of Pre-Islamic Arabian history; these stories are selected preferably among unpublished texts or texts which were not yet translated in English. The tales are preceeded by a brief critical study discussing the historical and cultural context either those same tales are framed in, or the sources narrating those tales were collected and written down. Part III of this series (Forseeing the Prophecy: monotheism vs. polytheism) deals with the shift from polytheism to monotheism in pre-Islamic Arabia. The voice of the first left little traces in contemporary sources; at the same time the voice of the latter re-shaped every narration according to its historical-religious perspective, since its main goal was to find Arab precedents of the prophecy that revealed in the 7th century CE with the coming of Islam. This volume introduces excerpts from: - Nihāya al-irab fī aḫbār al-Furs wa-l-ʿArab (“The final purpose on the news about the Persians and Arabs”) a work preserved in several manuscripts in European libraries – ascribed to al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828), but highly suspected to be apocryphal. - A commentary to the poem Ḏāt al-furūʿ fī buyūt ʿAdnān wa-qabāʾili-hā wa-faḍāʾili-hā (“The branchful [poem] on the houses of the ʿAdnān, their tribes and their qualities”) by al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. al-Imām al-Manṣūr (d. 623/1226), found in the Arabic manuscript A 68 ar. preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. - The Waṣāyā al-mulūk wa-abnāʾ al-mulūk min walad Qaḥṭān b. Hūd (“The testaments of the kings and the the princes of the children of Qaḥṭān b. Hūd”, a work again ascribed to al-Aṣmaʿī or al-Ḫuzāʿī. - The Kitāb al-tīǧān fī mulūk Ḥimyar, (“The book of crowns on the kings of Ḥimyar”) by Wahb b. Munabbih (d. 729 ca.), though remastered by Abū Muḥammad Ibn Hišām al-Ḥimyarī (d. 833).