Islam in Late Antiquity: Al-Azmeh's Point of Arrival Theory

Was the emergence of Islam a sudden divine rupture in an isolated desert, or the inevitable "point of arrival" for centuries of religious and political trends in Late Antiquity?

Aziz Al-Azmeh’s groundbreaking analysis reframes the origins of Islam not as a unique event occurring in a historical vacuum, but as the most successful “crystallization” of existing ideas circulating throughout the Near East. By shifting the perspective from “Islam and Late Antiquity” to “Islam in Late Antiquity,” Al-Azmeh argues that the Arabian Peninsula was never a tabula rasa or isolated backwater. Instead, it was a dynamic node w...