TY - JOUR AU - Akasoy, Anna PY - 2019/03/06 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Islam and Buddhism: The Arabian Prequel? JF - Entangled Religions JA - ER VL - 8 IS - SE - Articles DO - 10.13154/er.v8.2019.1-32 UR - https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/7395 SP - 1-32 AB - <p>Conventionally, the first Muslim-Buddhist encounters are thought to have taken place in&nbsp;the context of the Arab-Muslim expansions into eastern Iran in the mid-seventh century, the conquest&nbsp;of Sind in 711 and the rise of the Islamic empire. However, several theories promoted in academic and&nbsp;popular circles claim that Buddhists or other Indians were present in western Arabia at the eve of Islam&nbsp;and thus shaped the religious environment in which Muhammad’s movement emerged. This article&nbsp;offers a critical survey of the most prominent arguments adduced to support this view and discusses&nbsp;the underlying attitudes to the Islamic tradition, understood as a body of ideas and practices, and&nbsp;Islamic Tradition, understood as a body of texts. Such theories appear to be radical challenges of the&nbsp;Islamic tradition insofar as they seek to reinscribe the presence of religious communities in conventional&nbsp;narratives of Islamic origins that do not acknowledge them. On the other hand, they often operate&nbsp;with an unreconstructed reliance upon the sources of the Islamic Tradition. The assessment focuses on<br>descriptions of the Ka’ba and objects associated with it as well as on a story about an Indian physician who&nbsp;diagnosed an illness of Muhammad’s wife Aisha. While Indian or Buddhist connections with western Arabia&nbsp;and early Islam do not appear to be entirely impossible, the evidence does not amount to a persuasive&nbsp;case for the early seventh century.</p> ER -