Life of Christopher

Christopher, a native of Baghdad who became patriarch of Antioch in about 349/960, was assassinated by Muslim rebels in 356/967 because of his loyalty to their Muslim ruler. When the Byzantines conquered Antioch two years later, his story was told in a variety of ways by those with different and competing interests. Christopher was mentioned in Byzantine histories and in Antiochian liturgies. However, by far the most extensive and detailed version of the story comes to us in the Life of Christopher, written by Ibrāhīm b. Yūḥannā, a Byzantine bureaucrat and translator who grew up in Antioch and knew Christopher when he, Ibrāhīm, was a young boy. The hagiography was originally composed in Greek and translated by its author into Arabic, but only the Arabic survives. Here I provide, for the first time, both a critical edition of the two known Arabic manuscripts and a full English translation. This text is a valuable testimony to Christian life in Antioch under both the Ḥamdānids and the Byzantines, and to the difficulties of life along the constantly shifting frontier of medieval northern Syria.

The Digraph اى in the Quranic Consonantal Text and the Identification of a New Letter Shape for Final Hē in the 7th to 8th Century Arabic Script

This paper proposes a hitherto unrecognized orthographic practice in the Quranic consonantal text: use of the digraph اى ,that is, alif + denticle, to represent the noninitial glottal stop, most often adjacent to the high vowels i/ī and less commonly in other environments. This feature leads to the identification of a new letter shape for the final hē in the early Islamic Arabic hand, originating in the Nabataeo-Arabic script, which in turn can explain a number of previously enigmatic spellings in the Quranic consonantal text.

Created After, From, and For the Man?

This article examines the diachronic development of Shiʿi exegetic discourse on the sentence Khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā (“created you from a single soul and created its mate from it”) in the Quranic verse 4:1, customarily read as describing the creation of the first couple, Adam and Eve. Applying feminist discourse analysis and focusing on the Arabic-language commentaries of twelve premodern Imāmī exegetes from the third/ninth to the eleventh/seventeenth century, my study reveals that the medieval commentary material both accumulated and transformed along a hermeneutical trajectory comprising three distinctive discursive stages. The first stage established the lore on Eve’s creation in dismissive terms, and the second strengthened these misogynous views to make the potential substance of Eve’s creation even more negligible. This concept was further expanded in the third discursive stage, in which the weak woman, inclined toward the material and the corporal, was seen as created to provide service and entertainment for the man. Her creation was thus used to justify gender hierarchy, even the seclusion of women.

Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities

This article discusses critical issues surrounding the Jewish-Muslim encounter, framed as an evaluation of the approach and conclusions of two recent publications by Aaron W. Hughes: Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017) and Muslim and Jew (2019). Hughes’s works present a critique of the established historiography on Jewish-Muslim relations and exchanges, examining such subjects as the Jews of late antique Arabia, the Jewish matrix of the Quran and formative Islam, and the Judeo-Islamic synthesis of subsequent centuries. I interrogate Hughes’s use of sources, treatment of previous scholarship, and privileging of the specific lens of the “religionist” in approaching the historical evidence. Both of the works under consideration here exhibit numerous problems of conception and argumentation that undermine their value for broadening current horizons of research or refining prevailing pedagogies. Ultimately, although they provoke numerous important questions and deftly expose the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of older scholarship, the books fail to offer a constructive path forward for specialists or stimulate a meaningful paradigm shift in the field.