Witness to early "Western" Islam(?)

The Iraqi Talmud is considered a generally Sasanian-era document. I say "generally" because, as with the Bible, modern scholars have identified exceptions. Yaaqob Elman lays out some examples.

Elman points out that the Talmud came from a mainly Babylonian mindset. Demons haunted this world, and even haunted its Jews. Some of these demons were Babylonian, like Lilith; others were Iranian, like the Ashmo Div translated "Asmo Deus" for us D&D players. Demons caused disease and plague; luckily for Jews, the Holy Name could run them off. Elman notes that the base Talmud doesn't know plague. From the AD 540s on, plague was absolutely a concern for any urban population - like Jews - and indeed plague comes up in the Talmud's sidelines. Here, for Elman, is evidence both for a pre-AD-540 Talmud; and for that text's sporadic expansion in later years. I do think AD 540 was a reform year generally.

Elman goes looking for other examples and identifies... skepticism against demons. Apparently "Westerners" didn't think much of demons. The Talmud even mounts a defence of daemonology. We children of "Enlightenment" see rationalism as intrinsically Western. Elman points out that pre-Khusro Iraqis wouldn't. Plenty of Christians went out and about in the Late Antique Romania, rather the Greek Rhomania, bearing a lively literature in the Spiritual Crusade. The pagans of Anatolia and Egypt were hardly rational themselves. As for fifth-century Armenia, LOL. So whence is the Talmud, in its later accretions, getting its anachronous idea of the Western Mind?

Elman in part III sees the rational "Western" tendency as seventh-/eighth-century: as Islamic.

I have to say, that is... quite a take. We modern Westerners've been making quite a bit of hay over the Djinns who float through Islamicate literature. Prayers against Djinns are pervasive. The Qurân admittedly subordinates the Djinns (and the Satans) who - there - have no power against God, nor against His Believers. But there the Qurân would just take us back to Judaism.

Elman doesn't footnote where Islam is supposed to be a force for rationality. I am sorry to speak ill of the dead (he is z''l since 2018) but this is a serious flaw in his 2005 work. We're left to speculate as to why he picked on the Islamic period for the Talmud's Western skeptics. Maybe by default, for a period deficient in primary philosophy for all Eurasia / North Africa.

I've argued that Islam didn't so much push rationalism as push out anti-rationalism. This left Muslims to concentrate on textual transmission, political theory, and mathematics. Demons can't touch this.

But here is another idea: West Syrian Christendom (and tagalong Jews). A Muslim who is sick could hire a Muslim exorcist. He can't hire a Christian or a Jew; their prayers are blasphemous or deficient (respectively). Alternatively he could hire... a doctor. And who's got Ahrun's Pandects and other leftover Greek text? Syrians got that. As long as he's not praying he can ply his trade.

It was Syrian nonIslam which associated science, mostly medical, with the West; and Islamic hostility to freewilled demons which allowed Syrians to practice.