John Tolan has studied at Yale University, USA (BA Classics), University of Chicago, USA (MA and PhD History) and the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (HDR); he is Professor of History at the University of Nantes, France and member of the Academia Europaea. He has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions, including two major grants from the European Research Council and the Prix Diane Potier-Boès from the Académie Française (2008). He is author of numerous articles and books, including Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (1993), Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), Sons of Ishmael (2008), Saint Francis and the Sultan (2009) and Muhammad the European (2019).

• Introduction JOHN TOLANPART I: Narratives of triumph and defeat1 The contours of Abrahamic identity:a Zoroastrian perspectiveYISHAI KIEL2 The twilight of the ancient godsDANUTA SHANZER3 Simon the god: imagining the other in second-century ChristianityDUNCAN E. MACRAE4 Contested ground in Gaza: the narrative of triumphalist ChristianityCLAUDIA RAPP5 Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: some intellectual preoccupations of Late AntiquityMOHAMED-ARBI NSIRIPART II: Forging legal paradigms6 What is “Islamic” about geonic depictions of the Oral Torah?MARC HERMAN7 Reevaluating the role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the formation of Islamic ritual and jurisprudence MOHAMMED HOCINE BENKHEIRA8 Recording debts in Sufyānid Fusṭāṭ: a reexamination of the procedures and calendar in use in the first/seventh centuryMATHIEU TILLIER AND NAÏM VANTHIEGHEM9 Slavery and sexual ethics: divergence and change in Hanafi legal discourseKAREN MOUKHEIBERPART III: Contemporary echoes10 Teaching early Islam: the gap between school and the internet in British schoolingPHILIP WOOD11 The Shahada and the creation of an Islamic identitySULEIMAN A. MOURAD