ABSTRACT
Not all monotheisms are ethical; the earliest variant, associated with the Egyptian ruler Akhenaton,1 was probably morally lax. God need not, solely in virtue of his numerical uniqueness, be a good being who makes moral demands on his creatures. Once self-qualifi ed as ‘ethical’, monotheism becomes self-congratulatory; defeated paganisms are summarily judged as unethical. Muslims are merciless editors of their polytheistic past. They repudiated the pre-Islamic era of Arab infi delity as a time of unrelieved uncouthness and ignorance (al-ja¯hiliyya) and, as part of the detoxifi cation of Arabia, they erased the residues of pagan poetry and virtually eliminated the secular poetic canon.2 This zeal to obliterate the literary past resembles the Roman custom of damnatio memoriae (damn the memory), the Orwellian-sounding dictate which authorized the senate to blot out the very names of those, especially emperors, who were posthumously declared enemies of the state. The record of Akhenaton, incidentally, was also scrupulously erased from the Egyptian hieroglyphic chronicles because his short-lived and rudimentary monotheism proved an affront to orthodoxy.
