Enclosed beyond alexander's barrier: on the comparative study of abbasid culture.

• Author: Silverstein, Adam
• Position: Alexander the Grea - Gog and Magog in Early Christian and Islamic Sources: Sallam's Quest for Alexander's Wall; Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and the 'Abbasid Empire - Book review

Much has been written over the past two millennia about Gog and Magog, the northern barbarians to whom an important eschatological role was assigned by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Even more has been written about Alexander the Great, the celebrated "world conqueror" whose impact on the Mediterranean, Near East, and Central Asia has been appreciated (and very occasionally lamented) by inhabitants of these regions for just as long. At some point in the early Christian era, the growing literature on Alexander's exploits came to incorporate an episode in which he built a monumental barrier behind which the chaos-spreading nations of Gog and Magog would be contained (and civilization spared). It was an odd--but not unparalleled--marriage of the essentially profane cycle of the "Alexander Romance" with the scriptural traditions of the adherents of the Abrahamic religions. In the centuries preceding the rise of Islam, this version of the Alexander Romance became wildly popular, was translated into an impressive number of languages, and circulated among the peoples of Europe and the Near East. The array of languages and cultures that adopted the Alexander Romance in late antiquity and the middle ages, coupled with the fact that the cycle was popular among the general public as well as the elites and therefore often transmitted orally, meant that it is well nigh impossible to trace accurately the precise means by which the Alexander Romance was disseminated.

One of the many languages into which stories from the Alexander Romance were translated is Arabic, and one of the many Arabic stories about Alexander that has reached us concerns a mission that the (Abbasid caliph al-Wathiq (r. 842-847) despatched in the 840s to investigate Alexander's barrier, having seen in a dream that it had been breached. The account of this mission was preserved by Ibn Khurradadhbih (d. 912), one of the earliest authors of an Arabic geographical work, who says that it was dictated to him by none other than the mission's leader, one Sallam the Interpreter (al-tarjuman). Sallam's account has generated controversy ever since, and some of the leading scholars of Near and Middle Eastern studies--including such heavyweights as J. T. Reinaud, V. MinorsIcy, Th. Noldeke, and M. J. de Goeje, among others--have studied the Arabic accounts of the barrier in general and Sallam's mission in particular. The basic questions that these authors raise is whether Sallarn's account is an accurate description of what he really experienced and saw, and if not, where he got the materials with which he embellished his report.

These questions are taken up in the two books under review, both of which seek to situate Sallam's account within a broader context. Both books make extensive use of sources from numerous genres and cultures in tracing the antecedents to and the reception history of Sallam's account. What is particularly interesting is how each book answers the same questions so differently. In the following I first assess the books individually and together; I then argue that our understanding of Sallam's account could be enhanced by reference to two further contexts, the one Mesopotamian and the other Jewish.

1. THE HISTORICAL APPROACH

   Gog and Magog by van Donzel and Schmidt seeks to make two main points: first, that Sallam did in fact embark on the journey that he describes and reach what he thought was Alexander's barrier; and second, that Sallam's description of the barrier was influenced by earlier Syriac accounts of it. Neither of these points is new, but the authors offer us the fullest presentation of the supporting arguments to date.

   The book is divided into two parts, each comprising six chapters. Part one surveys sources that will allow us to read Sallam's account with an appreciation for the literary materials that shaped it. We thus find chapters on Gag and Magog in pre-Islamic sources (chapter one); Alexander the Great and Gog and Magog in pre-Islamic, eastern Christian sources (chapter two); Gog and Magog and Dhu l-Qarnayn (the latter clearly representing Alexander in this context) in the Quran (chapter three); Gog and Magog in Islamic tradition, mostly hadith literature and the like (chapter four); and two chapters on Gog and Magog in later Islamic (mostly Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) literature, including poetry, adab, and folklore (chapters five and six). While the authors do dedicate space to the reception history of Sallam's account (to which they return in part two), one gets the distinct impression that these materials are presented in the interest of thoroughness and they are really interested in a rather old-fashioned quest for the origins of Sallam's account, a quest that is resumed in the second part of the book.

   Part two largely focuses on Sallam's journey itself, providing the reader with an abundance of materials that aim to demonstrate that Sallam's itinerary tallies remarkably well with the historical geography of the regions through which he traveled. We are given an Arabic text of the account and an English translation of it (on facing pages).(1) Chapters are devoted to versions of Sallam's journey in Arabic sources (chapter seven); to pre-Sallam Arabic and Syriac materials that might have shaped Sallam's account (chapter eight); to the historical-geographical background to al-Wathiq's despatching of a mission to the barrier (chapter nine); to an examination of "the outward journey" in detail (chapter ten); to a study of the Jade Gate of the Great Wall of China that Sallam is thought to have reached and equated with the barrier (chapter eleven); and to Sallam's "homeward journey" (chapter twelve). The main argument in part two appears to be that Sallam did indeed undertake the journey that he describes, even if the retelling of his experiences is colored (be it intentionally or otherwise) by Syriac and other accounts of the barrier.

   The authors present their materials and make their points in an admirably direct manner--there is little jargon to speak of and helpful rubrics and sub-chapters are provided throughout. Thus, although there are typos, stylistic infelicities, or even mistakes on most pages,(2) one is never in doubt as to what the authors are arguing. That said, some of the arguments themselves can be disputed, and the authors' points about the Syriac origins of Sallam's account present a number of problems, as follows.

   The book's presentation of pre-Islamic materials presupposes that the cultural repertoires of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and the users of different languages within these communities were distinct and easily separable. Accordingly, Christian materials could be neatly distinguished from Jewish ones in late antiquity. Many scholars would consider such an approach to be naive.(3)Moreover, the authors are inconsistent in assessing the endurance of a particular culture's influence; while they are happy to assume that Christian authors who use Jewish sources such as the Sybilline Oracles or the Book of Jubilees represent Christian tradition (p. 12), they refer to the Ottoman poet Ahmedi's (d. 1413) description of Alexander's barrier as evidence for "the ongoing influence of the Syriac tradition" (p. 116), even though--as they themselves demonstrate elsewhere in the book--the relevant materials had long been naturalized by Muslim authors.

   On a related note, the authors' division of the materials along Jewish, Christian, and Muslim lines and their analyses of the transmission of these materials from one culture to the next are unconvincing. The implication is that the transmission of ideas between Jews, Christians, and Muslims followed the sequence of these religions' historical development. The problem with this, if it is not obvious already, is that the emergence of Christians and particularly Christian cultures and ideas did not spell the end of dynamic Jewish cultural activity (in fact, Jews were more culturally productive after the rise of Christianity than before it), just as the emergence of Islam did not spell the end of Christian cultural productivity. This issue is complicated moreover by the fact that some of the Syriac materials postdate the Quran and the rise of Islam: hence, an identifiable Syriac source may be the basis for the Quran's passage on Alexander's barrier, as Kevin van Blade] has shown,(4) but an early Islamic interpretation of this Quranic passage came to influence a later, eighth-century Syriac text on the same topic. Except in rare cases--of which this is not one--it is difficult to demonstrate direct, one-way influence when dealing with the reception of Biblical and other popular themes among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

   The authors' lack of a consistent methodology in accounting for the origins of Sallam's travelogue is evident throughout the book; they propose a number of means by which the Syriac materials could have made their way into Sallam's account without clearly stating how they imagine that this actually happened. Thus they argue separately and confusingly that (1) the Syriac materials had already long been incorporated into Arabo-Islamic culture, as evidenced by Q 18 and by early Arabic poetry that reflects such influence:(5) (2) that Sallam would have encountered Christians in Iraq who transmitted the Syriac materials to him:(6) and (3) that Syriac literature, including accounts from the Alexander Romance, was to be found all along the Silk Route, including places on Sallam's itinerary.(7) In short, the authors appear to be hedging their bets in suggesting that wherever he turned Sallam was likely to encounter the relevant Syriac materials.

   That Syriac (among other) sources influenced Arabic versions of the Alexander Romance is beyond serious doubt, and it is very likely that such sources also influenced--in some way or another--Sallam's own travelogue. The authors have assembled a wide-ranging selection of Christian materials supporting the case...