In an interview on Jewish History

So the idea is that there’s been some retrospective tidying up there—which in terms of cultural history is a familiar pattern. But your second book, by Steven Wasserstrom, switches focus to Islam. It’s called Between Jew and Muslim: the Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam. What does that mean? Does it continue the same theme of retrospective refinement; that just as Jews and Christians had much more in common for far longer than we have been taught to suppose, so did Jews and Arabs?

Well if you were to phrase that "Jews and Muslims", that would be absolutely true. One of the things that comes out of Boyarin’s book is precisely the vast difference between Christianity, which can say "render under to Caesar…" and separate church and state, and Judaism and Islam where there is no such conception. And that’s really the fundamental thing. Those divisions don’t exist. There’s no word for religion in traditional Jewish language at all. And that’s something shared by Islam. The head of the state is the defender of the faithful….

What’s the central thesis of the book?

Wasserstrom is talking about some remarkable parallel developments between Muslims and Jews in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries—one of which is an attempt by the Persians to reassert their cultural independence in the face of the domination of Mecca, Damascus and then Bagdad. This attempt takes the form of religious dissent, so it’s not accidental that the centre of Shiism is Persia.

But at the same time that Shiism was arriving, which was frequently Messianic, there were Messianic movements amongst the Jews, one of which lasted four or five centuries. The name of the Messiah in question was "Abu Isa", which means "Father of Jesus". It’s hard to get at his message because it was only recorded by people who didn’t like him, but he seems to have preached a tolerant or even a synchronistic approach to religion. But it’s all resisting the centralising efforts of the Rabbis who want to unify and homogenise Rabbinic Judaism. There’s all kinds of resistance to that attempt.

The idea that these two strands of Judaism and Islam emerged simultaneously is consistent with the first book. The idea of separate, competing and yet curiously similar strands emerging from - what? We’re talking about a very sociological reading of these events I suppose. But they emerge, these religions, from a common root—that’s to say, a single God. Do you think that’s relevant? That if one follows all these strands back then one is looking at a group of patriarchal religions competing for a single father figure?

Well no. You’re getting too Jungian for me there. No, it’s not the sort of language that I feel comfortable with. What’s happening here is that religious language is being used—because I’m sociological, as you’ve correctly pointed out—religious language is being used to mask other kinds of resentment and resistance. And what’s striking is that the Muslim dissenters, the Shiites and so on, are rejecting the oral traditions of the Sunni, of the orthodox Muslims. And the Jewish dissenters are rejecting the orthodox traditions of the Rabbis.

What’s more this Abu Isa I was talking about was represented as an illiterate. Now the idea of an illiterate Jewish Messiah is just unthinkable unless you accept the traditional biography of the Prophet. Mohammad is said to have been unlettered; that he was simply a vessel through which God’s voice was transmitted… People memorised what he said and then it was written down in the Koran about a generation later.

Something similar there, also, to the Holy Spirit's descending to the New Testament disciples in the form of a Pentecostal flame? And of course the advantage of simply being the vessel of God’s word is that one does not defend a point of view, but an absolute truth.

Yes, the Koran is considered the most perfect book in Arabic. It’s divine. Which is a good segue to Bran’s book, which is about Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In Jewish history this is thought of as the golden age. A very prosperous Muslim empire, and the Jews were profoundly involved in this society. There were Jewish ministers of external affairs, Jewish prime ministers and Jewish commanders of the armies and so forth. They were very much involved in this society.