Presentation, 32. Deutscher Orientalistentag, Münster

Ioannis Stouraitis

On eastern Christians in Byzantine Sources: Visions of Community

The current paper aspires to deal with the subject of the image of eastern Christians in post-eighth century Byzantine written sources. In the turbulent period from the mid-seventh to the early eighth century, the Byzantine Empire was faced with the danger of disintegration due to intensive Arab offensives that culminated in two sieges of Constantinople. This situation changed after the second decade of the eighth century through the consolidation of the Isaurian dynasty in Byzantium and the ascent of the Abbasid dynasty to power in the caliphate; an event that led to the culmination of the process of institutionalization of Islam and the crystallization of the image of the Muslim religious-political community.

This latter development is also tangible in the change of Byzantine discourse on the Islamic community as documented between the history of Nikephoros Patriarch and the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor written in the late eighth and early ninth centuries respectively. Within this framework, the scrutiny of the image of Christians under Muslim authority in the post-eighth century Byzantine sources goes beyond theological discourses and has a significant political and cultural dimension. It pertains to the question of differentiated notions of collective identity as opposed to the normative ideological conflation of Romanitas and Christianitas in Constantinopolitan discourse as well as to the relevant issue of representation of boundaries between pre-modern societies by politico-intellectual élites, which often promotes a misleading image of those societies as bounded totalities.

Wednesday 25.09.2013, Raum: F 229, 2. OG, Fürstenberghaus

DOT 2013 Program

Presentation, 32. Deutscher Orientalistentag, Münster

Olof Heilo

How can we understand Islam without Byzantium?

The encounter between the world of Islam and Byzantium has normally been an object of scrutiny for historians and medievalists preoccupied with its cultural and political manifestations. Its religious dimension – though acknowledged as such – has tended to be a more elusive matter, complicated by the differences in epistemology of the historical adversaries.

In recent years, this has been re-considered from the mutual apocalyptic viewpoint of many Muslim and Christian sources to the early Islamic era (Howard-Johnston 2010; Sarris 2011): Islam here appears as the face of a wider “world crisis” that saw the gradual downfall of the secular Roman power in the Mediterranean, and the rise of “empires of faith” that would dominate Europe and the Middle East for centuries – perhaps even into the modern era.

As one can easily see, such interpretations, important as they are, bring other problems with them: the historical context is exchanged for a historicist one, and the apocalyptic narratives appear increasingly detached from the circumstances that brought them forth. On the other hand, this matches the way in which Islam and its history are treated in many contemporary political debates: as a closed, teleological phenomenon, cut off from the dialectics of history.

Do we need to re-evaluate the historical contexts we call Byzantine in order to understand modern Islam in a non-apocalyptic sense? It seems as if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “Orientalists” from Montesquieu to Renan, twentieth-century historicists from Spengler to Huntington, and modern Islamists from Jalal ad-Din al-Afghani to Ali Shariati would all have it in common that they use the void left by misconceptions about the Middle Ages in general and Byzantium in particular, to promote a teleological reading of Islam.

In this paper, we should consider whether a reverse reading of the “World Crisis” interpretation could contribute to a different understanding of Islam.

Wednesday 25.09.2013, 10.00-10.30, Raum: F 229, 2. OG, Fürstenberghaus 

DOT 2013 Program