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Mary, Sister of Aaron: Difference between revisions
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#The Arab audience of the northern Hijaz was not actually illiterate and pagan as the sirah and tafsir literature would have us believe, but was rather already in Muhammad's time largely Christian and intimately familiar with the literate, multi-lingual Grecophone and Syriac-speaking culture of the Byzantine near east. | #The Arab audience of the northern Hijaz was not actually illiterate and pagan as the sirah and tafsir literature would have us believe, but was rather already in Muhammad's time largely Christian and intimately familiar with the literate, multi-lingual Grecophone and Syriac-speaking culture of the Byzantine near east. | ||
#This surah (at least the first section) was not composed as the preaching of Muhammad, but was rather the product of Christian holy men working for an Arabic-speaking audience inside of the Byzantine empire; the first part of the surah which makes these allusions is thus a separate text from the later part of the surah which is heavily "Islamic" and lacks the complex Christian allusions. The entire surah as a whole is thus a composite work. | #This surah (at least the first section) was not composed as the preaching of Muhammad, but was rather the product of Christian holy men working for an Arabic-speaking audience inside of the Byzantine empire; the first part of the surah which makes these allusions is thus a separate text from the later part of the surah which is heavily "Islamic" and lacks the complex Christian allusions. The entire surah as a whole is thus a composite work. | ||
#Muhammad did not compose and preach this surah in the Hijaz, but rather in or around Palestine for an audience that would understand it; if Shoemaker in his book The Death of a Prophet is to be believed, this could have been after he personally conquered Jerusalem itself. | #Muhammad did not compose and preach this surah in the Hijaz, but rather in or around Palestine for an audience that would understand it; if Shoemaker in his book ''The Death of a Prophet'' is to be believed, this could have been after he personally conquered Jerusalem itself. | ||
===Likely Meaning of Imran=== | ===Likely Meaning of Imran=== | ||