Mathieu Tillier (2022) on epigraphy

Last weekend, having done on academia.edu what I did, I pondered doing another deed - this time, my usual doody over there which is translation. It's Mathieu Tillier's "Towards" article, Vers une nouvelle méthode de datation du hadith. This matches epigraphy (sometimes dated!) with the Hadith, which tends to be backdated.

Here's my effort, "Towards a new method of dating hadith".

I do hope de Gruyter and Academia between them let me keep that translation up there; although my translation is mostly Google (so is entirely Tillier's except for errors) and, also, I didn't do Annexe 1. (And I updated the font to what De Gruyter prefer in 2023-4, and I took an editorial liberty with the title.) I wish I'd known about that article years ago.

Because - wallâhi but the original article was a fine one. This delivers what Yehuda Nevo promised, some sense-making of protoIslamic graffiti. Nevo thought he could validate Wansbrough's theories of "prophetic logia". There was a lot of underpants-gnomery in that thesis, as Jeremy Johns and (more politely) Robert Hoyland pointed out. Tillier by focusing on the du'a Hadith is able to hit Islamic tradition where most-testable. The graffiti bears less speculative weight that way.

Contra Motzki and the Umlauts, Tillier seems to have caught at least Ma'mar and maybe even 'Abd al-Razzaq out in a lie. This is where the "hub" (nœud) has concocted a "relay" (échangeur) before him; he'd heard the prayer (which is now being carved in rock), and just figured - hey, Ayyub Sakhtiyana used to pray like this (whether or not he did) and then credited predecessors (who never prayed like that).