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.