InViolence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and ...Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.
THE DANCING MARTYR Sizgorich, Thomas
History of religions,
08/2017, Letnik:
57, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The article presented here, which Tom was working on before his death, represents a new direction in his research. While his monograph examines particular continuities between late Roman and early ...Arab Muslim cultures, here Tom turns his attention to the relations—real or imagined—between Muslim elites and Christian subalterns in the early Islamic period.
Sizgorich delves into the conflict between Imperial Rome and emergent Islam. He also offers readers a rare look at both how Islam defined itself as an uncompromising, highly principled faith and how ...Christmas misinterpreted this attitude for mere militancy. In order to establish this contrast, he reconstructs the patterns of interaction, especially of a military sort, that governed relations between both Roman and Persian imperial forces and Arab peoples before Muhammad.
When one recognizes that the narratives of remembrance that mattered in the late Roman world familiar to members of pre- and post-conquest Arab communities were not those of the classicizing ...historians or church chroniclers but rather those of hagiographers and pious storytellers, the ways in which the akhbar collected by the first Arab historians were fashioned into Muslim communal histories become more comprehensible.
The history of jihad is often cited by modern critics of Islam as proof of the essential irrationality of Islam as a system of belief. This conceit has a long history in anti-Muslim polemic, and is ...part of the earliest Christian responses to Islam's appearance. In fact, however, close reading of our earliest Muslim texts suggests that as Muslims of the first centuries after the appearance of the Prophet Muḥammad sought to understand and explain the place of jihad within Islam, they frequently described the institution and practice of jihad as closely kindred with well-established modes of Christian piety, whether these were holy war waged by Christian Roman emperors, or the ascetic labors and zealous, sometimes violent, striving of Christian monks. Accordingly, this article argues, if, as some now suggest, the institution of jihad underscores within Islam some penchant for fanaticism or violence undertaken in God's name, so too is the call to jihad legible as an echo of the penchant for violence individual Christians and whole Christian communities have manifested since long before the birth of Muḥammad.
The Arabic account of the early medieval
Passion of Antony Rawḥ is a remarkable source for the character of Abbasid-era Muslim-Christian relations in that, although it recalls an instance of ...intercommunal violence, the account itself suggests a profound familiarity among Christian audiences with the defining communal narratives of the early Muslim umma. What is more, certain specific uses of language and apparent allusions to Muslim texts may also reveal this text as one intended for mixed audiences of Christians and Muslims. This only becomes apparent, however, when we read the Passion of Antony Rawḥ in tandem with certain contemporary Muslim texts recalling the personalities and events of the first/seventh-century Arab conquests, texts that recent research suggests were themselves crafted in accordance with much older late ancient hagiographic traditions.
The individual represented by this figure is less important than the valence the figure itself carried in Roman political thought and in the annals of Roman imperial memory. ...the temple destruction ...and other episodes of inter-communal violence that had come to characterize the age were, in Libanius's rendering, manifestations of the personal will of a man whose domestic concerns, signaled here by the sign "wife," had come to dominate his public undertakings. "33 In this, "Cynegius" joins not only Antony, but a litany of other vilified Roman and Greek political entities, from Demosthenes' enemy Philocrates to Catiline to the emperor Claudius, all of whom were attacked with gender-charged rhetoric. Because women were so closely associated with the private domestic sphere in Greco-Roman political discourse, to suggest that a man was a slave to his wife's whims was often tantamount to suggesting that, with regard to the eternal tug of war between public duty and private desire that resided in every Roman psyche, such a man was inclined to the private at the expense of the public.34 Since the time of the Republic, the intrusion of powerful private interests into the public workings of the res publica incited a profound anxiety among theorists of governance and ordinary Romans alike.35 Private accumulations of power endured as a point of concern for emperors in the third and fourth centuries as well, and remained a persistent dilemma into the reign of Justinian and beyond. ...in Libanius's estimation it was not merely marble columns and likenesses of the old gods against which the monks spent their fury, but against material manifestations of the political, historical, and cultural claims of Rome's ruling elites upon the power and authority with which they perform their traditional roles. Like the iron of the nail now conjoined with the gold and jewels of the diadem, the base metal of persecution could not be extracted from the diachronic statio of the Roman emperor.
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