The Making of the Medieval Middle East
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Jack Tannous
About this book
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.
What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Maps
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Preface
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Introduction
1 - Part I: Simple Belief
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CHAPTER 1: Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy
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CHAPTER 2: The Simple and the Learned
46 - Part II: Consequences of Chalcedon
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CHAPTER 3: ‘Confusion in the Land’
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CHAPTER 4: Contested Truths
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CHAPTER 5: Power in Heaven and on Earth
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CHAPTER 6: Competition, Schools, and Qenneshre
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CHAPTER 7: Education and Community Formation
181 - Interlude: The Question of Continuity
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CHAPTER 8: Continuities—Personal and Institutional
201 - Part III: Christians and Muslims
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CHAPTER 9: A House with Many Mansions
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CHAPTER 10: A Religion with a Thousand Faces
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CHAPTER 11: Joining (and Leaving) a Muslim Minority
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CHAPTER 12: Conversion and the Simple—The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
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CHAPTER 13: Finding Their Way—The Mosque in the Shadow of the Church
400 - Part IV: The Making of the Medieval Middle East
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CHAPTER 14: Rubbing Shoulders A Shared World
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CONCLUSION: Dark Matter and the History of the Middle East
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APPENDIX I. Approaching the Sources
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APPENDIX II. The ‘Arab’ Conquests
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Abbreviations
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Works Cited
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Permissions
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Index
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