The first published book from Reyhan Durmaz, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the transmission of stories about Christian saints and biblical characters into the early Muslim community, placing both Christians and Muslims in the wider context of late antique storytelling. From the beginning, Durmaz is clear about the three scholarly conversations to which Stories between Christianity and Islam contributes: “performative hagiography, early Islam as a late antique religion, and narrative transmission in the context of Christian–Muslim relations” (1).
Overlapping with these three scholarly conversations, Durmaz uses her introduction to introduce three themes that will run throughout the book. First, she discusses the practice of “narrating stories” by coining the term hagiodiegesis, a concept connected to hagiography but emphasizing orality and performance. Naturally, there are complicating factors in studying hagiodiegesis, because “this oral and embodied practice in antiquity can only be rendered visible through written texts” (4), but Durmaz emphasizes the importance of understanding the processes that brought saints’ stories to a wide audience. She examines the phenomenon of “narrative literacy” and notes that it destabilizes “social boundaries like literate and illiterate, and by extension, learned and simple believers” (4). Here she is nuancing the recent work of Jack Tannous (The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers, 2018) by examining the different forms of literacy that could exist beyond the theological elite of late antique society.
Second, Durmaz discusses the scholarly practice of “sorting stories” into categories such as “biblical,” “nonbiblical,” “Arabian,” “qur'anic,” and so on. She argues that in the late antique context, those with narrative literacy would not necessarily have placed such a strong emphasis on the boundaries of various canons and religious traditions when sharing stories of saints and prophets.
Finally, the theme of “remembering stories” analyzes the various figures who transmitted stories of Christian saints into the Islamic tradition, both in the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and in subsequent centuries. Durmaz notes that a knowledge of stories could provide a pathway to religious authority for many in Late Antiquity. She also argues that while narratives could sometimes be transmitted with little change from one context to another, it was more common to pass down a variety of stories about an identifiable persona or heroic character, stories that might sound quite different from one telling to another.
The book's first chapter covers the late antique Christian background of saints’ stories and hagiodiegesis, noting some of the methods and contexts through which stories were passed from one person to another. Pilgrimage networks and households were important settings for storytelling, helping to augment the religious authority of sacred places, their keepers and residents, and powerful households respected for their narrative literacy.
The remainder of Stories brings the early Muslim community into the scene. Chapter 2 focuses on the Prophet Muhammad as storyteller, with Durmaz emphasizing that even if the Qur'an is considered the word of God, it is still appropriate to analyze Muhammad as the narrator of the stories in the sacred text and to discuss the way these stories functioned for the Prophet and his community. The following chapter focuses in detail on one chapter (sūrah) of the Qur'an, al-Kahf 18, which is especially rich in its engagement with late antique stories.
Chapters 4 and 5 move to the post-qur'anic tradition and take a different approach, focusing on a range of Christian saints and their roles in the various genres of Islamic literature. The scope in chapter 5 narrows to discuss one story in particular—that of Paul of Qenṭos and John of Edessa, who appear in Islamic sources under the names Fīmyūn and Ṣāliḥ. Durmaz notes that one of the most common uses of saints’ stories in early Islam was to fill in exegetical gaps in the qur'anic narrative, but she does an admirable job of uncovering the numerous other contexts in which these stories are found, such as moralistic texts and histories. The book's sixth and final chapter covers some concluding themes: Islamic views of monks and sanctity, the complexity of “authorship” in the context of hagiography and hagiodiegesis, and (returning to a topic from chapter 1) the role of important families in transmitting stories.
As should be obvious from the three scholarly conversations referenced above, Durmaz is speaking to multiple academic audiences in this book. This gives the book an ambitious scope, and Durmaz makes interesting and valuable contributions to all three discourses. Her emphasis on story narration allows her to move beyond the limitations of analyses that focus only on elite literate culture—while naturally remaining dependent on the products of that culture as sources—and to explore the forms of narrative literacy that were more widespread in Late Antiquity. This also helps her to move beyond the strict boundaries between religious traditions and other categories that have been so important to modern and premodern scholars, into the more fluid and complex world of late antique people sharing stories that were not always clearly marked as Christian or Muslim.
The book's ambitious scope can also give it a somewhat disjointed feel at times, as Durmaz speaks to her various audiences; for example, her neologism hagiodiegesis is a constant topic of discussion in chapters 1 and 2, but hardly appears in the book thereafter, even as Durmaz continues to apply insights from her earlier analysis. Nevertheless, Stories between Christianity and Islam does much to fill out the picture of the late antique landscape and the rise of Islam that has been sketched in influential recent studies. Durmaz offers a commendable first book that will be valuable reading for scholars interested in Late Antique studies, qur'anic studies, orality studies, hagiology, and beyond.
