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Lev Weitz, Reyhan Durmaz. Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 461–463, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae528
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Extract
Reyhan Durmaz’s Stories between Christianity and Islam is a welcome contribution to the robust, growing subfield focused on Islamic late antiquity—that is, the subfield in history and religious studies that does not view the establishment of the Islamic caliphate in the seventh century as a radical break with the Roman past, but seeks to frame the emergence of Islam and its associated polity within late antique history. Durmaz’s monograph approaches Islamic late antiquity from the vantage point of a single practice that is at once social and religious: the oral narration of edifying stories of the lives of holy figures. The book traces this practice from the late Roman Christian world into the societies of early Islam, arguing that it shaped significant aspects of Qur’anic and other Islamic religious literature, and shows how that literature repurposed the narratives of various late antique holy men to new ends.
The introduction lays out the book’s theoretical stakes and defines its subject with a new term of the author’s coinage, “hagiodiegesis”: “orally narrating saints’ stories” (12). Chapter 1 makes clear that the book has a fairly specific practice in mind; although stories of saints’ lives might have been encountered in the late antique world in church liturgies or through direct reading of texts, Durmaz is interested in extemporaneous storytelling in less institutionalized settings. There is an obvious methodological challenge here, as the author has only written textual sources to study a diffuse oral practice. But the chapter quite effectively draws on the established literature on orality and the primary texts themselves to identify the evidentiary moments at which oral recitation has shaped the rhetorical framing of written texts; the texts, Durmaz demonstrates, are snapshots of what were ongoing, interactive processes of writing and recitation that produced saints’ lives in late antiquity. Chapter 1 also points to the linguistic breadth of the book’s source base, as it makes use of hagiographies in Latin, Greek, and Syriac before moving on to Arabic texts in later chapters.
