Continuity and Change: Elite Responses to the Founding of the Caliphate

Abstract

The wealth of recent scholarship on Late Antiquity demonstrates a seminal shift in perspective on the rise of Islam. The impression of most twentiethcentury historians that Muhammad's mission inaugurated a new epoch that definitively buried Antiquity is undercut by now prevailing views that Islam's emergence did not trigger a rapid transformation of Middle Eastern life, politics, or even some of its religious systems. Late antique landholding elites, clerical establishments, and Christian and Zoroastrian rural populations greeted the emergence of the caliphate as a political change at the top that necessitated limited alteration to their local structures; the full transformation of the Middle East into a Muslim world appears to have unfurled more gradually. Scholarly emphasis on "continuity" does however carry latent risks of hypercorrecting the previous paradigm of "change" by overemphasizing some of early Islam's continuities with Antiquity. Notwithstanding continuities identified in recent scholarship, key changes did occur, especially among those who authored the venture of Islam. This paper considers the scale of continuity and change by evaluating how communities of the early caliphate's military elites responded to the success of the conquests and establishment of the caliphal system.To assess the scope of change, this paper's focus is upon the social: the ideas that provide windows into the self-identity of the early caliphate's communities. Moving beyond the application of labels that define peoples/ sects/ groups in rough-hewn generalized and totalizing outlines, there is a need to sharpen analysis by posing questions to our sources that can reveal how communities articulated their sense of self: how did they conceptualize issues of identity? What sort of world did they think they inhabited, i.e., what spatial narratives did they construct to express their senses of "home" and proprietary space? What roles did they accord religious rituals in setting communal boundaries?Along with these broad questions, we pay particular attention here to perhaps the period's most salient issues of community and identity: Islam and Arabness and the employment of these terms in connection with articulations of the communal "inside" of the caliphate's elite. By posing questions