Damascus after the Muslim Conquest Text and Image in Early Islam [Hardcover]

Before it fell to Muslim armies in AD 635-6 Damascus had a long and prestigious history as a center of Christianity. How did this city, which became the capitol of the Islamic Empire and its people, negotiate the transition from a late antique or early Byzantine world to an Islamic culture? In Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, Nancy Khalek demonstrates that the changes that took place in Syria during this formative period of Islamic life were not simply a matter of the replacement of one civilization by another as a result of military conquest, but rather of shifting relationships and practices in a multifaceted social and cultural setting.

Even as late antique forms of religion and culture persisted, the formation of Islamic identity was affected by the people who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. Khalek draws on the evidence of architecture and the testimony of pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians to shed light on this process of identity formation. Offering a fresh approach to the early Islamic period, she moves the study of Islamic origins beyond a focus on issues of authenticity and textual criticism, and initiates an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, storytelling, and the interpretations of material culture.

Chapter One: Narrative and Early Islamic History
Chapter Two: Telling Stories: Historical Writing in Early Islamic Syria
Chapter Three: John the Baptist and Sanctified Spaces in Islamic Syria
Chapter Four: Iconic Texts: Damascus in the Medieval Imagination
Afterword

This is an impressive scholarly study based on Arabic sources. Interdisciplinary in approach, it deals with questions of architecture and archeology, historiography and narrative. It shows how the transition from late antiquity to the Islamic era in Syria was not a replacement of a Byzantine-Christian civilization by an Arab-Muslim one, but a subtle transformation and blending of the two. It is well written, lƒ1