Hugh Kennedy’s scientific contributions

The concept of “Islamic late antiquity,” first developed, I believe, in the work of the late Tom Sizgorich, has now achieved a general currency among historians as a hermeneutic device for interpreting and explaining the first three centuries of Islam rule in the Middle East, roughly from the time of the Prophet until the middle of the tenth century. Sizgorich uses the term to describe a pattern of inter-communal relations and the role played by religious violence in maintaining the boundaries between different sects and groups – a pattern that he saw extending from late antiquity (as described in the accepted Peter Brown model) into the early Islamic period, with more communities and actors entering the fray. As such, his work played an important part in undermining those sharp but unhelpful barriers that still separate the world of late antiquity from the world of early Islam, both inside the academy and outside. In this chapter I argue that the concept also has a value and validity in looking at the world of administrative and, above all, fiscal systems in the early Islamic world. I argue that the early Islamic state, alone of the polities that succeeded Roman rule in the Mediterranean world, preserved and exploited an effective system of public taxation, especially a regular system for the taxation of agricultural land. It was preserved not because of any sentimental or ideological commitment to an old and — as far as the early Muslims were concerned — largely irrelevant imperial model, nor yet because there was a bureaucracy already in place that they continued to use out of a sort of institutional inertia, but because these structures were of immediate use and were, indeed, indispensable. To understand why this should be we need to look at the course of the Muslim conquests of the third and fourth decades of the seventh century, 3 and the consequences that followed from them.