Ghita Vlad Adrian: Seven Christian Perspectives on Islam

     The Christian accounts of Islam which I shall present in this paper come from seven authors, of which six are Byzantine and the last is Roman-Catholic. These seven are: 1. Saint Anastasios of Sinai (~630-700 AD); 2. Saint John of Damascus (675/676-749); 3. Theodore Abu Qurrah (750-820, Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox bishop of Harran); 4. Niketas Byzantios (a philosopher from Constantinople in the nineth century AD); 5. Bartholomew of Edessa (13thcentury); 6. John VI Kantakouzenos (Byzantine Emperor between 1347-1354); and 7. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), a Western philosopher who, through the amplitude of his philosophical position, becomes a universal figure in his own right, surpassing the strictly confessional borders of Roman-Catholicism.    The Eastern Orthodox countries are the natural heirs to the Byzantine Empire because, according to Nicolae Iorga's formula ”Byzantium after Byzantium”, they have intercepted the Byzantine heritage. Moreover, the Byzantines and later the Eastern Europeans have had a contact of long standing with Islam. This is why, when I search for the specificity of the medieval Christian perspective on the Islamic faith, it is natural to pick more thinkers from the Eastern part of Europe and only one Western author. The general refutal of Islam which is found in the texts of the Byzantine Church intellectuals is also endorsed by Saint Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) who, at the very beginning of Renaissance in the West, defended the Orthodox Church’s teaching against the rationalist humanism of Western-minded intellectuals like Barlaam of Calabria, being then taken captive by the Turks in Gallipoli.

Philip Wood: Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the Gubbite monks and their Muslim patrons

Dionysius of Tel-mahre held the patriarchate of Antioch through the support of Abdallah ibn Tahir, the governor of the Jazira. This paper examines how this support worked in practice, through legitimating his role in collecting tithes and, where necessary, backing up the patriarch's writ with coercive force. However, Dionysius' opponents had their own Muslim patrons too, and we also consider how the monks of Gubba Barraya used their contacts with members of the Alid family in Baghdad to develop their own claims to the patriarchate. The crucial context for this uncertainty over who held the patriarchate was the aftermath of the caliph al-Ma'mun's victory in the civil war over his brother al-Amin. Syria and the Jazira had long been out of the hands of the caliph in Baghdad, and it was unclear how far he would be willing to commit resources east of Iraq. At the same time, al-Ma'mun had very seriously entertained appointing an Alid, Ali al-Rida, as his successor, which made the connections of patronage in this era opaque and unclear. At its heart, this paper argues that ecclesiastical politics in this period cannot be understood divorced from wider patterns in Islamic political and cultural history.

Barbara Roggema : Pseudo-Athanasius of Alexandria's Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem: a Byzantine Window onto the World from the Umayyad Period

This paper will contain the major results of my project on the 7th/8th c. Quaestiones ad Antiochem ducem (at King's College London and Ruhr University Bochum). I will cover three different aspects that are crucial for our understanding of the Sitz-im-Leben and purpose of the text: (1) who are the opponents openly and covertly targeted in the text (Jews, Muslims, Christian heretics, half-hearted Christians etc), how are their views (mis)presented, and which targeted group seems to provoke most questions? (2) which rhetorical and argumentative strategies does the text employ? (3) to what extent does the text show awareness of burgeoning Islamic theology?My discussion of these issues will show that even though the text strikes one as 'a mixed bag', the attempt to persuade Christians of the logical and moral consistency of a Christian way of life in defiance of the critique of it by various outsiders is the driving force behind most answers.

Sean Anthony: Christian and Muslim Scholarly Élites in Contact in the Late-Umayyad Period: Evidence from the Literary Sources

It is a truism the Umayyad caliphs, though Muslim rulers over a vast Islamic polity, administered an empire comprised of realms whose demography and religious landscape remained numerically dominated by Christian communities. Although this feature of the Umayyads’ empire was largely absent from their cultural and religious epicenter in the Hijaz region of Western Arabia, it was a profound, quotidian truth in the region at the epicenter of their imperial, military, and administrative strength – the Levant – where early Muslim elites lived cheek by jowl alongside their Christian subjects. This paper explores how this Levantine environment impacted the élite Muslim scholars whom the Umayyads patronized and provides evidence for the profound ways in which Christians scholars of the Levant, in particular those closely associated with the Jerusalem Patriarchate, left a significant, and hitherto unappreciated, impact on seminal Muslim scholars patronized by the Umayyad caliphs.

Emiliano Fiori: Reshaping the Fathers, Learning Controversy. Syriac Patristic Florilegia as Laboratories of Religious Polemic in the Early Abbasid Age

The present paper aims to expound the first results of the research carried out within the framework of the ERC-StG project FLOS on Syriac patristic florilegia hosted at the University of Venice. It aims to present a short survey of the structure and aims of early Abbasid manuscripts containing vast anthologies of excerpts from Greek Church Fathers in Syriac translation. These anthologies or florilegia, produced by Miaphysite scholars, clustered the excerpts around topics that were the object of heated debate (especially but not exclusively Christology and the Trinity) among Christians and between Christians and Muslims from the 8th to the 10th centuries and beyond. In this rearrangement, the old authorities served as fresh handbooks for new religious polemic. The paper will discuss the excerption techniques, the thematic choices, and thereby the theoretical strategies of the compilers; it will also briefly introduce the differences between the manuscripts containing the florilegia.

Kelli Gibson: How the cross was lost: the transmission and reception of Syriac legends of the True Cross

The Syriac tradition preserves two accounts of the discovery of the True Cross: the Protonike legend and the Helena legend. Although these two legends first circulated independently, in later manuscripts they appear side-by-side, causing narratival disjunction. If Protonike had already found the cross, why is it found again by Helena? To resolve this inconsistency, a short “narrative patch” appears, explaining how the cross was lost again after Protonike's discovery. But why place the stories one after another in the first place? This paper traces the transmission of the narrative patch back to two 9th-century Syriac treatises on the Feast of the Discovery of the Cross attributed to John of Dara and Moshe bar Kepha. They are the earliest known witnesses to narrate the two legends successively. Both treatises also deploy apologetic arguments to defend the veneration of the cross and rebut accusations of idolatry, a frequent topic of debate between Christians and Muslims. This paper argues that interreligious contact with early Islam could have provided the initial impetus to recount these two legends side-by-side, even if that required creative resolution of narratival disjunction.

George Marinescu: Muslim doctrines of the Virgin Mary in the view of the Holy Fathers

This study tries to comprehend the main doctrines of the Virgin Mary in the Islamic Tradition and their relation with the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the eastern and western Christianity. The aim is to show the way in which the Qur’an and the Hadith correlates with the writings of the Holy Fathers of the Church.Because of the fact that in the Islamic tradition we deal with both doctrines from the orthodox and catholic traditions, this article will include insights of Fathers from eastern Christianity like Saint John of Damascus, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and from western Christianity like Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ambrose of Milan and others.The main doctrines that are concerning me are the status of Theotokos, or Mother of God, the Perpetual virginity, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption into Heaven. I will also provide information about the way in which any of the two religions influenced each other regarding this issue.