The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity by Aziz Al-Azmeh

Author:Aziz Al-Azmeh [Al-Azmeh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

Space, time and divinity reconfigured

The subordination of multiple divinities to the supreme deity involved two major movements, the one conceptual and the other practical, at once cultic and social. The latter involved cultic centralisation by an emergent, exclusive cultic association, with cultic worship being directed to the one supreme being to the exclusion of others. Allied with this latter was the conceptual movement expressed in the connotative and conceptual expansion of Allāh, as he moved on from the preternatural world to create the space for conceiving the supernatural realm. This involved centrally the recasting of categories of the supernatural and divine, and the reclassification of their members. This classification moved from the relative parity, commensurability, porosity of borders, and translatability or at least mutual recognisability of divinities known to polytheism, be they called rabb, ilāh, jinni or mal'ak, all of which might have been regarded indifferently as daemones and theoi by the ancient Greeks, to a hierarchy within the supernatural realm. This categorical reconfiguration of the preternatural and the conceptual incipience of the supernatural yielded a ranking which, in the standard henotheistic manner, set up an instance in the divine world to which other categories of the supernatural were subordinated. Muslim traditions speak of Muḥammad instructing ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and Abū Bakr that, upon their conversion, they are expected to disavow al-andād, Allāh's associates,268 that is to say, not to fall into shirk, associationism.

This formed a constituent part of the eventual move from a combined scheme of monolatry and henotheism, the former cultic and the latter conceptual, to monotheism. We witness here, in standard manner, categories of certain supernatural beings not only demoted in rank, efficacy and energy, but also made to submit to the supreme deity, now declared uniquely divine, all the while preserving for these other beings a supernatural status as actors, while being removed from the category of divinity, now dissolved as a general category and become the descriptive characteristic of one supreme being: only Allāh was to remain divine, the others uncanny and preternatural, or otherwise (and this applies to angels) belonging to a derivative, secondary order of sublimity. This also involved on occasion the denial and indeed the extirpation of some erstwhile divinities: in the case of Muḥammad, we see clearly a double movement whereby deities properly so called, the āliha or arbāb, were declared to be chimerical and ineffectual, and eventually had their cults extirpated, while those supernatural beings whose worship, veneration or propitiation did not have a cultic infrastructure – jinn and angels, and devils as well – were not denied, but were Islamised and made to be subservient to and created by the supreme being.269

This pairing of cultic restrictiveness and exclusivity with a measure of conceptual permissiveness in the understanding of supernatural categories was noted by an early exegete. Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 767) spoke suggestively of ‘al-shirk fi’ṭ-ṭā‘a, dūna ‘ibāda’,270 associationism of obedience, not of worship, taking note of the plurality of supernatural potencies in a subordinationist economy of the supernatural.

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