Syria between Byzantium and Islam: Making incommensurables speak

This dissertation deals with the social and cultural history of the Middle East in the Late Antique and early medieval periods. It attempts to address two large historiographic questions—the character of the Byzantine Dark Ages and nature of early Christian-Muslim interactions—from the perspective of the Aramaic-speaking Christian population of the Middle East. The first section focuses on the sophisticated intellectual culture that developed among Syriac-speaking Christians in the Late Antique and early medieval periods and contrasts its efflorescence with the fate of Greek at the same time. It is argued that the Greco-Arabic translation movement of Abbasid Baghdad represents the culmination of a Syriac tradition of scholarship which stretches back to Late Antiquity. The second section of the dissertation seeks to answer the question of why such a culture of scholarship and translation should have developed in the Syriac-speaking world when it did. The nature of interconfessional relations between Christian groups is examined and it is argued that Middle Eastern Christianity in the early medieval period was characterized by a diversity of Christian groups whose separation into distinct churches was only partial, with a consequent intense competition between these groups for adherents. It was this diversity and competition that fueled the development of the flourishing intellectual culture encountered in the first section of the dissertation. It is argued, moreover, that much of the intellectual activity which was taking place among Miaphysites was being driven by the needs of a curriculum of study for educating a distinctly Miaphysite clergy. The final section of the dissertation attempts to understand the place of Islam in the picture of the early medieval Middle East given in the first two sections. Christian-Muslim interaction and religious conversion are examined, as are Late Antique continuities into an Islamic context. Just as the history of Byzantine culture is more than Greek, I argue, the history of the Middle East is much more than the history of the politically-dominant Muslim minority which ruled it: we cannot understand early Islam unless we see it as a minority religion taking shape among a majority population adhering to highly-sophisticated and more ancient rival confessions.