Stories Between Christianity and Islam - by Reyhan Durmaz (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian-Muslim relations that shifts focus from discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. Here, the late antique and medieval Near East is viewed as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where stories of saints were used to interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future.

In this book, Reyhan Durmaz uses these stories to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between these two religions in the Middle Ages. With an in-depth study of storytelling in Late Antiquity and the mechanisms of hagiographic transmission between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, Durmaz develops a nuanced understanding of saints' stories as a tool for building identity, memory, and authority across confessional boundaries.

From the Back Cover

"A novel work on orality and the circulation of stories in medieval Islamic lands. This book has the potential to inflect the conversations on intercultural transmission that have held center stage in the field for the past couple of decades."--Arietta Papaconstantinou, Associate Professor of Ancient History, University of Reading

"Durmaz performs the daunting task of developing for a wide, inter-disciplinary audience the ground-breaking, specialist research of Angelika Neuwirth and Aziz al-Azmeh. Like them, Durmaz works against scholarly obsession with the written text. She retraces transmission, instead, through situated storytelling, a practice which in her treatment is revealed as the most synthetic cultural act of the late antique and paleo-Islamic period."--Elizabeth Key Fowden, Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Classics and Fellow, Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.

"A superb, original piece of scholarship...Durmaz's engaging text offers a welcome innovative perspective on 'Abrahamic' scriptural and hagiographic narrative arts. From the broader phenomenon of orality in the transmission of stories generally to the more specific details and 'canonical' requirements of recitation, this is a significant detailed analysis of a multi-faceted performative dimension."--John Renard, Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University

"An innovative and important contribution to the rich and rapidly growing body of scholarship on medieval Christian-Muslim relations. Reyhan Durmaz's focus on the universal human practice of storytelling as the site of flows of information between Christians and Muslims is excellent and will open up this line of investigation to future researchers."--Jack Tannous, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University

"Reyhan Durmaz gives a fascinating tour of storytelling about saints that goes well beyond oral-written divides. Her analysis of narratives in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages shows how communities of Christians and Muslims shared stories and adapted them in complex ways, changing their own ground truths in the process."--Sarah Bowen Savant, author of The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion

Review Quotes

"Reyhan Durmaz's Stories between Christianity and Islam is a welcome contribution to the robust, growing subfield focused on Islamic late antiquity. . . . A compelling view of the long life of saints and storytelling from late antiquity to the medieval period and from Christianity to Islam."-- "American Historical Review"

"Stories Between Christianity and Islam stands as a fascinating, yet nuanced, investigation into Christian-Muslim relations during the early medieval period. . . and will undoubt­edly be seen as a valuable contribution across various fields of scholarship."

-- "Medieval Encounters"

"An excellent inquiry into the hagiographic texts of Christianity and Islam from late antiquity. . . . a worthwhile read for students of Christian-Islamic intertextuality, one that raises many questions and thought-provoking arguments."-- "Reading Religion"

About the Author

Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-translator of Jacob of Sarug's Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met.