This seminar will draw on the literature and material culture of the Middle East in late antiquity to explore how the resurgent indigenous cultures there – Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic-speaking Jewish, and Armenian – re-emerged alongside the decline of local Hellenism to form a population that in the seventh century embraced a new political and religious hegemony while retaining their own traditions.
In one way, the seminar revisits an old question, repeatedly posed by western thinkers since the early middle ages – why did Christian and Jewish groups welcome the Muslim Arabs as liberators from their co-Christian, Byzantine Greek- or Latin-speaking overlords? Why did a religion – Islam – that is self described as a religion from and for Arabs understand itself as a theological antidote to the disputatious religious thought of Christians? We will also address the related allegation that Islam was an eastern Christian heresy, an allegation contained in the legend that Muhammad was taught by a monk of some heretical stripe, with its inherent claim of local Christian treason and schism from the church of the later Roman Empire. Yet we also ask a new question -- how did the formation of these local cultures and indigenous forms of Christianity give regional groups the independence to deal with Islam?
Members of the Seminar will be invited to participate in a historical re-reading of texts – some familiar, some less so – that permit a look backward, toward the foundations of the Greco-Roman hegemony in the first and early second centuries in the region, but also forward to the cessation of that hegemony, the contest with resurgent Iran and the West. In doing so, we will also engage an older question – the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire – in a new way.