The paper presents how the pluralism of relations in the early Muslim sources concerning the memory the Qādisiyya narrative is problematic for reconstructing the event of the battle by modern scholars. Specific studies of the early Islamic sources concerning the Battle of Al-Qādisiyya lead to the conclusion that it is certainly easier to interpret the functions of particular topoi than to determinate the facts about the Maʿrakat al-Qādisiyya. The main, unsolved questions related to the Qādisiyyah narrative are the uncertainty of the date of the battle, the size of the Muslim and Persian forces that fought in the Maʿrakat al-Qādisiyya as well as some contradictions and different presentations of the battle. Scholars have undertaken many attempts to make the conflicting accounts more coherent but in fact, they only made some speculations or, at the best, case scenario – explanations made on the basis of limited and uncertain evidence. For these reasons, the paper contains the suggestion to avoid an undue emphasis on the importance of the Maʿrakat al-Qādisiyya and to replace this term by the more general expression “the Mesopotamian campaign 634–637.” The critical evaluation of the Muslim sources leads to a more general description of the Battle of Al-Qādisiyya as an element of the campaign (stage 634–637) whose unambiguous evaluation is impossible.

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the field of Arabic and Islamic studies became enriched by a number of multi-facetted scholarly theories challenging the traditional account on the early centuries of Islam. An author of one of them was the Israeli scholar Yehuda D. Nevo (1932–1992), working in archaeology, epigraphy and historiography. He devoted much of his career to the studying of Arabic rock inscriptions in the Negev desert, as well as to investigating literary and numismatic evidence of nascent Islam. In his theory, the gradual development of the Islamic faith, inspired by Abrahamism with an admixture of Judeo-Christianity, went through a stage of “indeterminate monotheism”. Not earlier than since the end of the second century A.H. one can speak of the formation of the dogmatic pillars of Islam, similar to those we know today. This paper is an attempt to sum up Nevo’s insightful input into the field of modern Islamic & Quranic studies today. Although controversial and unorthodox, many later researchers repeatedly refered to Nevo’s plenty of inspiring theses in their quest for facts on Islamic genesis lost in the maze of time and shifting memory of generations.

In this short paper, nine formerly unpublished rayed lamps from south-eastern Turkey, eight from Mardin and one from Malatya are being presented, belonging to a well-known type, starting from the end of the sixth century A.D., which became particularly widespread in the eighth century A.D. The article adds to a group of ‘rayed’ lamps from the Near East next few examples found in less accessible museums in Turkey and it also includes a useful historical sketch of the region during the Byzantine and Early Islamic period. The publication of these new specimens is valuable as the material from this area of modern Turkey is rarely published. While waiting for research on the many further lamps that are likely to be found in numerous museums to be published, this contribution helps us understand the variety of lamps and their area of diffusion, which stretches from northern Mesopotamia down to Palestine, including south-eastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

The paper exemplifies chosen textual variants extant in Qur’an versions in the Islamic world, focusing on printed readings according to Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim and Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ, against the historical background of Ibn Muǧāhid’s qirā’āt reform (10th century C.E.). The studied issue is part of and sheds light on a broader problem – the quest after elaborating a critical text edition of the Qur’anic text based on the oldest and best manuscripts. The preliminary conclusion is that neither Ibn Muǧāhid nor the oldest, surviving works by Muslim scholars devoted to the Qur’anic qirā’āt did actually record the factual state of the oral tradition from the 7th century, but that the variants of the oral tradition as codified in the 10th century have their origin only in the late written tradition (probably also only from the 10th century, possibly not much older).