Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, from the Book of Omens, 16th c., Qazvin, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reyhan Durmaz. Stories, Saints, and Sanctity Between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2019.
Ibn Isḥāq (d. 768), in the Biography of Muhammad, vividly describes an interesting event. After Muhammad recited a qur’ānic passage about the Youths of Ephesus, the author says, a man in the audience stood up and told the crowd that he knew a better story. Narrating the Persian epic of Rustam and Isfandiyar, the man asked the crowd: “How is Muhammad a better storyteller than I?” This passage throws significant light on late antique storytelling: a Christian legend preached in Arabia contested using a Persian legend; a community remembering the Prophet challenged by storytellers; a medieval author glossing this episode with his broad knowledge of hagiographical traditions in the eastern Mediterranean. In light of this and similar narratives, how and why were particular, especially non-biblical, Christian saints transmitted to Islam? With this overarching question in mind, my dissertation analyzes encounter and exchange between Christianity and Islam in late antiquity and the Middle Ages through the lens of saints’ stories, their textual and oral narrators, and their audiences.
The dissertation draws on a broad array of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts, including saints’ lives, homilies such as those of Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), the Qur’ān and qur’ānic commentaries, the Biography of Muhammad, local and universal historiographical works, belles-lettres, and travel literature. I begin by reconstructing the agents, methods, and contexts of hagiographical storytelling in Christianity and Islam, a religious practice which I refer to as hagiodiegesis. After an overview of hagiodiegesis in late antique Christianity via a narratological analysis of Greek and Syriac saints’ lives in the Introduction, Chapter 1 brings the early Islamic community into the picture. Through a narratological reading of the Qur’ān and other Islamic literature, I argue there was a considerable amount of knowledge of Christian saints in the community around Muhammad. Reconstructing this community as a part and participant of the broader world of late antiquity subverts the arguments of the so-called “informants of Muhammad” and the model that portrays him as the mediator between the monotheistic traditions and the pre-Islamic Arabs in the Hijaz. Muhammad and many others in the early Islamic community were transmitters, narrators, and interpreters of Christian saints’ stories. As Muhammad’s prophetic career and qur’ānic preaching solidified, his life and narrations also became parts of the broader scriptural and hagiographical milieu of the eastern Mediterranean.
The social-historical reconstruction of ancient storytelling in the introduction and Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for analyzing the roles of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature. Until now, this question has mostly been considered in the context of qur’ānic exegesis. Building on the voluminous scholarship, Chapter 2 of the dissertation analyzes a Qur’ān chapter, sūrat al-kahf (Q18), demonstrating the methodological limits and challenges of studying the conversations between the Qur’ān and Christian hagiography. The chapter, with a focus on a small group of qur’ānic narratives, inquires after two topics that have mostly been treated separately in scholarship: the Qur’ān’s participation in the broader scriptural and hagiographical world of late antiquity, and medieval Qur’ān scholars’ engagement with Christian hagiography for qur’ānic hermeneutics. Both the formation of the Qur’ān and its exegesis were processes in which Christian hagiographical knowledge was continuously accessed and creatively used. The Islamic community had an extensive knowledge of and familiarity with the Christian homiletic milieu, as close comparative analysis between the Qur’ān, its exegesis, and Christian homilies, such as those of Jacob of Sarug, demonstrates. This knowledge and familiarity did not manifest as a repetition of the narratives and tropes in the Christian homiletic milieu, but as a new, scriptural reorientation of this hagiographical information and memory. In other words, while acknowledging the undeniable similarities between the Qur’ān, qur’ānic exegetical narratives, and Christian homiletic discourse, the chapter emphasizes the re-contextualization of the latter by and for the Muslim community.
Chapter 3 and 4 argue that, in addition to qur’ānic hermeneutics, Christian saints’ personas and stories were also used as didactic examples of universal piety and wisdom; as “excellences” (faḍā’il) to praise towns and regions for encomiastic purposes; as members of the eternal Muslim community; and as etiologies for Islamic beliefs and practices. Chapter 3 analyzes four Islamic texts and their uses of Christian hagiographical information. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s (d. 894) Wajal, a didactic text exhorting on fear of God and confidence in deed, creatively uses hagiographical knowledge from the dossier of St. Antony of Egypt, interweaving it with other folkloric and epic traditions from the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Ibn Hishām’s (d. 833) Tījān, a local historiography of south Arabia, appropriates the image of Alexander the Great (especially as portrayed in the Syriac-Christian Alexander Legend) and presents him as a pious, monotheistic king of south Arabia. In the universal history of al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), Tārīkh, St. George Megalomartyros is presented as a member of the eternal Muslim community, showing an extensive knowledge of the saint’s hagiography in the Syriac tradition. And lastly, Ibn al-Azraq (d. 1176) uses the Life of St. Marūthā of Maypherqat in his local historiography, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, as a source of historical information for the buildings of his hometown and its history. While highlighting the various roles Christian hagiography fulfilled in Islamic literature, the chapter studies the different modes of transmission. It is common in scholarship to define transmission between Christianity and Islam as drawing items from a shared pool of tropes, symbols, and forms of expression. This model, although helpful in emphasizing the shared semiotic world, underestimates the dynamisms and agencies that played into transmissions. Hagiographical transmissions could take place at the level of literary trope, persona, or the story of a saint, and each one of these levels required a certain set of mechanisms and agencies on part of the author and the transmitter.
While Chapter 3 presents the broad spectrum of the uses of Christian saints’ stories and personas in Islamic literature, Chapter 4 focuses on one story and its transmission and reception history. The 5th-century Syriac story of saints Paul of Qentos and John of Edessa, in an abbreviated form, first appeared in the Biography of Muhammad in the 8th century. The chapter first analyzes the transformation of the story between Syriac and Arabic, Christianity and Islam, and the 5th and the 8th century. This comparative analysis highlights the oral milieu as a continuum that connects Christian and Islamic world of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The chapter then tracks the transmission history and trajectory of the story of Paul and John (renamed as Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ in the Islamic tradition) in historiography, exegesis, belles-lettres, and sufi treatises in Islamic literature from the 8th until the 12th century. Different transmitters and authors re-established their relations to Christian saints and hagiography through their various literary treatments of this story.
The final chapter of this dissertation brings together the different examples analyzed in the preceding chapters to draw a number of theoretical conclusions. This dissertation nuances our understanding of Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages by taking the inquiry of cultural and literary transmission beyond the confines of binary models such as impact and influence. Transmissions of Christian hagiographical knowledge were not isolated instances of exchange, nor was Christian hagiography merely a reservoir of tropes for the Muslim author. Narration and veneration of saints was a shared space, which was constantly expanded, negotiated, and contested between Christianity and Islam. The increasing knowledge of Christian saints in Islam allowed Muslim communities to participate in a broader ecumenical exchange. At the same time, this knowledge proved to be a powerful tool for Islamic communities in a number of different contexts.
Muhammad preaching, from the Remaining Signs of Past Centuries, 17th c., Istanbul, Bibliothèque nationale de France
Christian hagiography in fact provided Muslim authors with a creative, flexible space for developing different modes of authorship. Depending on the literary context in which a Christian saint’s story was embedded, and the purpose towards which it was oriented, it provided new possibilities of authorship. For example, if a saint’s story was used for exhortation on universal models of piety and wisdom, like St. Antony in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Wajal, or Paul and John in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) Muḥāḍarat, the Christian features of the saint’s story were peripheral; therefore, the author did not need to de-emphasize the Christian background. Whereas, if the saint’s story was used to define the Muslim community prior to Muhammad, the reorientation of the story required more editing and muting of the Christian features and discourse. This content-based authorship model, the dissertation argues, is a significant alternative to genre-based authorship model (which suggests that generic conventions guide the author in her/his choices of literary practices during the composition of a text). The dissertation also highlights that, due to the ways in which orality played into the transmission of stories across confessional boundaries, authorship was a complicated practice, sometimes appearing as collective authorship or pseudo-authorship.
Christian hagiography also helped Muslim communities define Islamic notions of asceticism and sanctity vis-à-vis Christian concepts and discourse. This nuances our understanding of the Islamic perception of Christians, differentiating between the perceptions of ascetics, monks, monasteries, and monasticism. The general tendency was that while individual Christians, lay believers, ascetics, or monks, mostly had positive images in Islamic literature, the institutional Christianity, epitomized by churches, monasteries, and monasticism, was usually opposed and represented with negative discourse. The changes in the titles of Christian saints in the processes of transmission of their stories to Islam are indications of this distinction. While they were referred to as pious, ascetic Christians in Islamic literature, their titles, such as “monk” or “bishop,” were often muted. The chapter expands this observation by tying it into the broader representations of monks, monasteries, and monasticism in Islam, and it demonstrates the intricacies and exceptions of these representations, thus developing a detailed framework for Muslim communities’ approaches to Christians.
The final chapter also highlights the importance of the early Muslim family for the transmission of Christian hagiographical and biblical knowledge to Islam. The knowledge of pre-Islamic traditions was a social asset through which many families established their prestige and competed with one another. The family was among the prominent contexts that facilitated the transmission of Christian saints’ stories into Islam, alongside with pilgrimage, travel, the court, and other contexts. This discussion ties the study back to the analysis of hagiodiegesis at the opening of the dissertation, bringing together the Christian and Islamic oral milieu. Finally, Chapter 6 also gestures towards future research on the transmission of Christian hagiography through non-literary media. Iconography, architecture, religious ritual practice, and other contexts, shed significant light on hagiographical transmission between Christianity and Islam. Although this topic expands beyond the confines of the dissertation, it is an indispensable part of the study of transmission, and the chapter brings to fore some important examples as preliminary observations.
Christian hagiography was a powerful medium with which Muslim communities built and expressed their distinct local identities, religious notions, and collective memories. In order to understand this medium, this dissertation undertakes an intricate study of the mechanisms of hagiographical transmission between Christianity and Islam. With this extensive treatment of hagiographical transmission, it contributes to a nuanced understanding of Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, by shifting focus from discourses of superiority, hegemony, and normativity to connectivity, commonality, and creativity between Christianity and Islam.
Reyhan Durmaz is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.