Jacob Lassner

The Covenant of the Prophets: Muslim Texts, Jewish Subtexts

For several years I have been trying to analyze Muslim historical thinking and the manner in which it affected perceptions of the Jewish past a past which Muslims fully appropriated as part of their own historical experiences and world-view. Put somewhat differently, I have been trying to understand the process by which a heritage common to both monotheistic faiths could and did become a bone of contention as well as a basis of mutual understanding. This linkage between Muslim self-reflection and the creation of a larger monotheist historiography is crucial to the formation of Muslim attitudes toward “the other,” the polemical discourse against Jews and Judaism, and, more generally, Muslim-Jewish relations throughout the Middle Ages. The present study is culled from a project on Muslim uses of the Jewish past.

Responses to Unwanted Authority in Early Islam: Models for Current Shi‘i and Sunni Activists

As their forebears did throughout their extended and interlocked histories, today’s Shi‘is and Sunnis weave narratives of remote ages and events into a rich tableau of contemporary politics. In effect, they consciously combine the past and present in dealing with events of the moment and anticipating developments of the future. The power of historical memory to shape opinion and behavior among Muslims in the modern Middle East comes as no surprise to scholars widely read in Islamic history and historiography. They understand only too well that in Muslim societies, where the bonds of tradition are ever so tightly wound, the remote past has never been a subject of mere antiquarian interest, or contains scant relevance for the general public. In contrast, believing Muslims who study of the past never allow received narratives to be treated dispassionately. For the Muslim faithful, what may be loosely described as “history” has always lent itself to partisan causes, because historic precedent, whether discovered or, as was more often the case, reshaped and even woven out of wholly new cloth, became the essential guide to contemporaneous political activity and the principle means by which opposing Muslim factions legitimized their leaders and justified their claims vis-a-vis one another.

Rashid Khalidi and the Palestinians' Failure to Achieve Statehood

Jacob Lassner is the Philip M. & Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University. He specializes in Near Eastern history with an emphasis on urban structures, political culture and the background to Jewish–Muslim relations. Among Prof. Lassner’s publications are eight books, the most recent being Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined, which he wrote with S. Ilan Troen.