Download PDF | Daniel J. Sahas, Byzantium And Islam Collected Studies On Byzantine Muslim Encounters Brill (2021)
549 Pages
Preface
Byzantine Studies have reached a high level of scholarship in the international academic scene, especially in the European and North American continents; one could not yet say the same with regard to the relations of these studies with the Arab and the Islamic world. Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft) have also reached an impressive level of breath and maturation; not so, again, with regard to the relations of Byzantine Christianity with Islam — not an insignificant connection in the context of world history and civilization, interreligious encounter, cross-fertilization, interaction and dialogue.
The notion “encounter” is not to be considered as a pedantic issue applied to superficial social or public relations, let alone a state with some political, economic, strategic, expansionist or other kind of profitable and self-interest disposition. Encounter signifies a relational state of being; the kind of disposition and behavior that springs out first from self-respect and entails then, in dignity and humility, constructive interest, sensitivity and respect for the “other”! As a human community we are still far from such a dignified point of maturation; otherwise we would not be still disregarding, let alone ignoring, negating and insulting the identity of the “other” through its manifestation in writings, symbols, and monuments of any kind.
Islamic studies were for me both, the opportunity and the challenge to see another religious tradition (in this case, Islam) with the religionswissesschaftlische methodology and frame of mind, phenomenologically-oriented, humanly-expressed, ecumenically-motivated. As a graduate student and during my subsequent academic life, from the early 1960's to the late 2010’s and beyond, I had the fortune, indeed the blessing, to have met a number of teachers and colleagues of high caliber in scholarship and sensitivity who, with their eloquent and provocative teaching, their human and friendly disposition, their oral and written word, but especially with their ethos and example, each one of them in his or her own way, contributed to the endeavor of the study of Religion, History of Religions, Islamic and Middle-Eastern Studies, Byzantine-Muslim Relations, to put all these in their proper relationship and in their exciting framework and inter-dependence. Although most of these persons are no longer bodily with us, yet by the example of their life and the quality of their work, they still remain eye and ear witnesses to the on-goings of our history, now and for many years to come!
Most, if not all, of my collected studies in this volume are, in some way, the seeds and the fruit of an encounter with them, either in the classroom or in an amphitheater, on the way to or in the context of some regional or international conference, in their home or in my home, in an airplane, in some written or electronic correspondence archive, in a campus office, or in some casual environment. Such a list can be long, exhaustive of patience, but on account of such a weakness it can never be bypassed, or forgotten. In the context of this volume, I need to remember:
Harold E. Fey (1898-1990), my supervisor Professor during my post graduate studies in Indianapolis (1965-66), co-author of the second volume Ecumenical Advance: 1948-68 in the monumental History of the Ecumenical Movement (2009), Editor of the well-known periodical The Christian Century (during the years 1956-1964), a passionate man for ecumenism, compassion and peace-oriented studies. Willem A. Bijlefeld (1925-2013), my Professor of Islamic Studies in Hartford, Conn. (1966-1969), my doctoral studies supervisor and instigator in exploring John of Damascus as a Father of the Church and pioneer historian of religions and of Islam.
Robert T. Parsons (191-1997), my Professor of African Studies at Hartford, who offered the comfort of his house for me to complete my dissertation while he would be on sabbatical in Africa. Ford Lewis Battles (1915-1979), the well-known translator of Calvin's Institutes, a relentless scholar and most encouraging, critical and supportive member of my dissertation Committee. Alexander Dimitrievich Schmemann (1921-1983), the unforgettable visionary Orthodox priest, scholar, dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and John Meyendorff (19261992), the memorable protopresbyter, aristocrat in descent, ethos, scholarship and collegiality, dean also of St. Viadimir’s Seminary and faculty member of Fordham University, both of them renown scholars and proliferous writers, who left life untimely, but who had always a place and time, in private meetings and in theological conferences in N. America, for a novice scholar on Byzantine-Muslim relations.
Irfan A. Shahid (1926-2016), a mentor, advisor and always friendly colleague at Dumbarton Oaks Center of Byzantine Studies, Washington D.C. (1996-1997), an authority and an inexhaustible source of information and views on Byzantium and the Arabs, an enthusiastic supporter of my research. Speros Vryonis (1928-2019), a senior advisor and a colleague for years on Medieval Middle Eastern and Islamic issues, and not only.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000) the well acknowledged Canadian Islamologist, director of the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, from whom most scholars and Canadian Universities teaching world religions, especially Islamic Studies, were seeking academic advice and his critical evaluation of their work, programs and standards.
Nicholas Oikonomidis (1934-2000), the distinguished Byzantinist in Canada for years, colleague and founder of the Canadian Committee of Byzantinists. Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), the meticulous Jewish orientalist, acute, respected and proliferous scholar.
Hadia Dajani-Shakeel (1933—), the beloved Palestinian colleague, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto and of Institute of Palestinian Studies, whose homey and gentle collegiality competed and matched her integral scholarship.
Sidney H. Griffith (1938—), an internationally known professor at the Catholic University in America in Washington D.C., specialist on Arabic Christianity, Syriac studies and Christian-Muslim encounter, whose doctoral encounter with Abi Qurra and mine doctoral encounter with John of Damascus brought us together in various academic fora as members of same learned Societies, in regional and international conferences as well as in various publications.
Yvonne Y. and Wadi Z. Haddad, the memorable couple of teachers, friends and colleagues, Editors of that very special 500+page-volume Christian-Muslim Encounters (University of Florida Press, 1995) that brought together a most interesting mix of contemporary colleagues and Contributors (like, Mahmud Ayoub, Willem A. Bijlefeld, Issa J. Boullata, John B. Carman, Kenneth Cragg, Hadia Dajani-Shakeel, Frederick Mathewson Denny, Johann Haafkens, Wadi Z. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, David A. Kerr, Donald P. Little, Roland E. Miller, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Jorgen S. Nielsen, Sulayman§S. Nyang, James E. Royster, Annemarie Schimmel, Olaf Schumann, Jan Slomp, Jane I. Smith, R. Marston Speight, Mark N. Swanson, Christian W. Troll, Harold S. Vogelaar, Jacques Waardenburg, and Antonie Wessels).
Jane Damen McAuliffe (1944—-), from her years as Chair of the Department for the Study of Religion and Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto, before returning to the USA, a hospitable General Editor of the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Quran (Leiden, Brill: 2001-2006).
John L. Esposito(1g40-), Professor of Religion & International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, founding director of the “Prince Alwaleed Centre of Muslim-Christian Understanding” at Georgetown University, Georgetown D.C., and many others. The list could go on for several pages to include wonderful persons as well as equally wonderful occasions and memories — all this to reconfirm that nothing is a matter of chance but of divine providence and, especially, that nothing can one achieve or offer, alone!
We live in an era in which the electronic means and the sites of communication make lists like this much broader and ever easier — always with a danger, however, that such an exercise might be rendered more impersonal and superficial and thus less constructive and educational. My pathological optimism makes me hope that the younger generation of scholars will not only overcome such a miserable pitfall but that they will turn such a challenge into a flourishing garden of priceless intellectual and academic achievements — a truly personal, living and lasting “Academia.edu”! In the folds of this site I am already finding bright and thirsty minds, diamonds of academic achievements, reading articles of mine critically and enriching them constructively with new scholarly and bibliographical data.
This list of young scholars is becoming for me much longer than my personal one; something which makes me confident that the drives and concerns which attracted some of us to devote our life to the subject of the manifold Christian-Muslim relations will expand, making this field of studies to flourish in multiple directions. This is the antidote to any kind of self-righteousness, empathetic radicalism, conscious ignorance, historical distortion, populist oversimplification and religious provincialism (in the end, to any form of human and cultural darkness) which we are experiencing often in our own days and in some regions of the world.
My profound sentiments of hope and confidence are leading me to an expression of sincere gratitude and appreciation to Brill, a source of quality scholarly publications in the manifold fields of relevant academic endeavours. My personal thanks go to Dr. Maurits van den Boogert who embraced the prospect of this publication wholeheartedly and offered his professional experience to its production tirelessly; a process which created for me a bond of a priceless friendship.
Daniel J. Sahas Athens, Friday July 23rd, 2020 (a day of a most sad awakening)
The Notion of “Religion” with Reference to Islam in the Byzantine Anti-islamic Literature
Religion in general and Orthodox Christianity in particular, although an essential component of the Byzantine society,! and the determining factor in refuting Islam, is nowhere defined in the Byzantine anti-Islamic literature. To arrive at some idea of the Byzantine religious self-understanding and its treatment of Islam as a religion on the basis of this body of literature, one has to identify religious characteristics by means of inference, and reverse them to a positive statement; because such references to Islam are characteristically negative, indeed, polemic.
Byzantine Christianity and Islam in practice viewed each other as worldviews, “religious” communities and theocratic empires mutually exclusive of each other, with only few, and not very honest, exceptions. Nicholas Mysticos, for example, Patriarch of Constantinople (go1-907, 912-925), in a letter addressed in 913 to the Abbasid caliph al-Muktadir (908-932) wrote that,
there are two lordships, that of the Saracens and that of the Romans, which stand above all lordship on earth, and shine out like the two nightly beacons in the firmament. They ought, for this very reason alone, to be in contact and brotherhood and not, because we differ in our ways of life, habits and religion, remain alien in all ways to each other.”
However, such statements are more of a diplomatic rhetoric made in negotiations for freeing Byzantine captives of war, and less words of conviction — let alone principles of Byzantine policy. They may even be seen as interplay between recognition and rejection of the Arabs as a military power, characteristic of the tenth century. The Byzantines knew of the Arabs, even before Islam as ‘Saracens,? a name of no definite ethnic identity with a pejorative and negative meaning. The Saracens were the “easterner” nomads,* ‘arabs’ in the seminal sense of the word, barbarians in culture, living in tents in the deserts east of the Jordan river, less involved with commerce and more with razzia warfare.
In some instances the name ‘Saracens’ had even a connotation of evil people. In the Life of Saint Pelagia the Harlot,® for example, it is said that after the ascetic bishop Nonnus baptized the well-known actress of Antioch turned harlot and administered to her the communion, the devil cried out, saying,
Alas, alas, what I am suffering from this decrepit old man? It was not enough for you to snatch from me three thousand Saracens and baptize them, and obtain them for your God.”
Three thousand Saracen captives of the devil are less worthy than one harlot! The Saracens, as Muslims now, were viewed as rivals of the imperial Byzantium. When the caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad the Arabs became ‘Persians’.® The change in name is neither accidental nor meaningless: as the Persians of the past, these contemporary ‘Persians’ were the new enemies of Byzantium. More to the point, as late as in the fourteenth century Muslims were identified as ‘Achaemenids’, the dynasty which had threatened the Roman Empire. Interestingly enough, even Gregory Palamas (1296-1360) calls his captors, who were Osmanli Turks, “pirates from the race of the Achaemenids”® For the Byzantines, Islam itself did nothing to ameliorate the image of the Saracens.
On the contrary, the Arab invasions and the fundamental claim of Islam that it is the revival of the purest monotheism of Abraham, God’s ultimate and perfected revealed religion to mankind,'° placed the Christianity which had been perceived by Muhammad on the defensive as an adulterated monotheism. Thus, Islam did not have the chance to be seen by the Byzantines for what it was essentially, let alone for what it was meant to be. At best Islam was seen as a “heresy”, and at worst as “superstition”, or barbarism. Given, however, the animosity produced by the protracted conflicts with Christological heresies, one may wonder which of the two characterizations carried a heavier weight!
This very negative context notwithstanding, one can identify certain insights which the Byzantines considered as characteristic components of Religion against which they contrasted Islam.
1 Ethnic Identity as Religion
“Islam” as a name, and thus as an awareness of the essence of the religious tradition as such, appears nowhere in the Byzantine anti-Islamic literature. Racial or ethnic names are the primary means of referring to Islam. For example, John Moschus (c.550—619) in his Leimon, and Anastasius Sinaites (c.640—c.700) refer to “Arabs”, not to Muslims.
However, the name had religious overtones as well. In Question 126 of his Questions and Answers," where the query is posed as to whether or not Satan had fallen for not having bowed down to Adam,” Anastasius’ response was that “Such as these are the myths of the Greeks and the Arabs”. As it is not clear how pagans would be dealing with Adam, creation of man, Satan, human nature and the origin of sin, one may rightfully agree with Sidney Griffith that the expression “Greeks and pagans” may be read to mean “pagan Arabs”! “Arab”, therefore, connotes “pagan” and by extension ‘Islam’ “paganism”. John of Damascus also (c.655-c.749), who is the first to deal with Islam as a faith, treats Islam as “the religion of the Ishmaelites’, who are “also called Saracens and Hagarenes’.
In John of Damascus “Hagarenes’, “‘Ishamaelites’, “Saracenes” consciously connote a tribal faith which is that of the father and founder of a tribe. In this particular instance all three names for Islam bear a pejorative meaning, as the religion of the illegitimate descendants of Abraham. Such an interpretation has its roots in Sozomenus,!> repeated by Bartholomeus of Edessa,!° and George Phrantzes (1401-1478).!” By using these names and giving them their own etymological explanations that the name “Saracen” is actually “Sarracene” and it is derived from Sarrah saying that her master dismissed her “empty” [xevy] of grace, the Byzantine polemicists contrasted Christianity and Islam as religions descending from the same ancestral roots, the one legitimate and the other as false faith. The seventh-century Christian Syrian apocalyptic writing of Pseudo-Methodius of Patara’® strikes a hopeful note that in the end Christ will defeat ‘Ishmael’, — again, a collective racial identification for the Muslims.
A minor exception to such identification is John of Nikiou, monophysite bishop and “rector” of the bishops of Upper Egypt (late 7th c). He calls the Arabs “Moslems” and “Ishmaelites”!9 Theophanes the Confessor (d. c.817) interchanges the name Arabs with “Hagarenes” and “Saracens”, referring in both instances to Muslims.?° George the monk, the “Hamartolos” (gth c.) also refers to “Arabs who are now known as Saracens (viv dé Xapaxnvol)”,?! suggesting that “Arabs” is their earliest identification, “Saracens” the religious one by which they are now known.
Religion, then, is a traditional way of life; a definition which implies history, lineage, culture, family rules and a sense of continuity. Islam is a family or tribal religion descending from Ishmael, the son of Abraham. George Hamartolos calls Muhammad “heresiarch” and Islam, Muhammad’s “hateful and most abominable heresy”,?? implying the teaching, “preference” (heresy), style of life, and law, of the strong man within the tribe.”
Photius (820-893), Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote about his “embassy to the Assyrians’, “Assyrians” here meaning “Arabs” and, of course, Muslim Arabs.”* Christians living in Baghdad would not have been called “Assyrians”. Thus the name “Assyrians” also carries the weight of some religious meaning, possibly that of non-Christians. Symeon Metaphrastes also refers to the Arab Muslims as “Persians”, and in the Arabic Life of Symeon the Stylite the name “Saracens” has been translated as “Persians”.
Nicetas Choniates (c.1155—c.1215/6) deals with “Hagarenes” and “Saracens”, but with a greater specificity. The 20th chapter of his Thesaurus Orthodoxiae bears the title “Tlept tij¢ 8pnoxetag tHv ‘Ayapyvav”.2> Here the religion of the Hagarenes is examined. By the 13th century enough of the doctrine and practice of Islam had become known for the Byzantines outside the eastern provinces to be able to put it into a “system” which could then be defined as “religion”. Islam is seen as the way of life of an [ethnic] people. It is a people’s traditional tribal affiliation. The Arabs, as Muslims, are of tH¢ “Ayap; the sons, or the descendants of Hagar, as the Vita of St. Peter the Athonite puts it,2° not people who profess submission to God.
As a summary on this point, one could mention Abu Qurra, the Melkite bishop of Harran (795-812). In his various opuscula?” Abu Qurra treats Islam and the Muslims as “Arabs” (v111), “Hagarenes” (Ix, XX, XXV), “Saracens” (XIX, XXI-XXV, XXxIII), “barbarians” (XIX, XXXV—XXXVII), and also as a “religion” (Senoxeta, x1x); all of them interchangeably. Three of these appellations, Saracens, barbarians and religion, occur together in the same opusculum (xix). According to Abt Qurra, Soycxefa is something which is transmitted from father to children. What people follow is the teaching of their fathers, and where people differ from one another is in what they have learned from their fathers.?® In this opusculum Abt Qurra contrasts what a “barbarian” that is, a Muslim has learned to what a Christian has been taught!
What this sketchy excursus shows is that for the Byzantines religion is neither a thing, nor one thing; Religion is a “they”. Religion is people and the way they are known and can be identified, ethnically, nationally and traditionally.
Without being defined, religion is observed and understood in terms of claims of history, tradition, ways, behavioural patterns of specific people. A people constitutes a religion and religion is the totality of manifestation of a people's life, culture, conduct, tradition and eschatological mission. Thence notions such as “Church” or “State”, or religion and secularism, seem to be an a priori non-viable distinctions. It does not seem also that the Byzantines were making a distinction between “religious” and “non-religious” people. The expression “atheists” with reference to Muslims did not mean “non-religious”, but rather “non-Christians” — those who do not believe in Christ as being God.?9
The treatment of religion as a wholistic ethnic identification seemed to serve as an insulation against subjecting religion to a detached, “clinical” examination and test. It was a kind of a passing in silence over something which is obvious, but at the same time illusive. It absolved someone from attempting to define one’s own or somebody else’s religion. The Byzantines did not define Islam, but neither did they refute it as a religion. Rather they attacked the Arabs as Saracens, Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, as the illegitimate sons of Abraham and misguided monotheists; but this is not Islam.
2 Religion as an Expression and Measure of Culture
Religion was seen by the Byzantines as a civilizing force and a means of gauging culture. To be religious meant that one had a certain finesse reflected in one’s own manners and even in appearance. Sophronius, for example, was shocked at the sight of the conqueror ‘Umar. According to one account, Sophronius at his first encounter with ‘Umar offered him his own cloak to change into as a proper clothing; a typological comparison between Christianity and Islam? “In truth, this is the abomination of the desolation established in the holy place, which Daniel the prophet spoke of’, Sophronious reportedly explained.?° Other sources, however, portray ‘Umar as a sensitive and pious man who asks the aged Patriarch to show him a place to pray, and who then gives Sophronius rights and privileges over the Christian sites and holy places.*! There is some irony in this exchange: the faithful is offering the “infidel” clothes as a token of civilization, while the “infidel” is asking the faithful for a place to pray as a way of expressing and establishing his identity! This is not the only instance in which the barbarian Muslims are used as examples of piety. Gregory Decapolites “Historical Sermon ... About a vision which a Saracen once had and who because of it he believed and became martyr for our lord Jesus Christ”? is a telling example of purity of heart which a barbarian Muslim possesses, but a Christian priest is lacking.
As we mentioned earlier, Anastasius Sinaites (c.64o-c.700) refers to Muslims as “pagan [Greek] Arabs”.33 In the Narrations of another almost contemporary “Anastasius Sinaites” the Muslim Arabs are referred to in one instance as a “nation” or, according to a later codex of the same narration, as “nations”, possibly with the meaning of “pagans”, or “barbarians”.3+ The same Anastasius calls the Muslims “the Amalek of the desert (6 geyuixog Aucdjx) who rose to smite us, the people of Christ”.35 Anastasius makes this characterization as he is condemning Heraclius and his grandson Constans for supporting Monothelitism. His statement is in line with the prevailing attitude of the Byzantines of all doctrinal affiliations (Chalcedonians, Monophysites, Nestorians) that the Arab invasions is God’s punishment for their own unfaithfulness and heresies; an accusation for which each group held responsible the others.36
Maximus the Confessor (580-662), incensed by the Arab conquests, and especially by the attacks of Saracens upon monasteries, used strong language to describe the Muslims as “wild beasts in human form’. Indirectly, he was defining Islam as a religion that inspires the Muslims with violence and destruction. The mastery of war does not change the image of the Arab Muslims as barbarous people. For Leo v1 the Wise (886-912) the Muslims are “the best advised and most prudent in their military operations’, but “of all the barbarous nations’.3”
Clearly, therefore, Religion is seen as a measure and test of a people's civilization. The Arab invasions reinforced such an impression of the Byzantines. Even when conversion takes place from Islam to Christianity, the imprint seems to remain intact. A most interesting case is that of an unknown Muslim who had converted to Christianity, died as a Christian but his name remained unknown. He entered the local martyrologium, and Constantine Acropolites (1217-1282) praised him, as ... “St. Barbarian’!?®
3 Opyoxeia. The “Non-European” Concept
Few, if any, are the instances in the Byzantine anti-Islamic literature in which the Byzantines are attempting to look at Islam as a spiritual force, beyond the actual experience or the caricature, which they formed or inherited about the Muslims. Two instances, however, need to be noted as exceptions, John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas. John of Damascus’ characterization of Islam as the oxefa (superstition, or darkness) tév Tovandrtav is most likely a copyist’s blunder for the word $pyoxefa (religion). He is the first controversialist who, indirectly, devised a master concept of criteria by which religion is defined, examined, and contrasted to another religion. His Fount of Knowledge, taken as a whole, is for his times a master definition of religion in general and of Orthodox Christianity in particular. It consists of three broad components: a) A terminological preamble in which key “religious” and “theological” categories are explained; something which points to the implication that language contains terms of which some are more fitting than others in expressing religious categories. b) A summary description of heresies, or false religious ideas or traditions, which illustrate what [true] religion is not; something which points to the diversity and subjectiveness (thus, inconclusiveness) in evaluating religion. c) A main body of comprehensive statements which constitute the substance of the faith and practice of each religious tradition; something which points to a sense of wholeness and finesse needed to be encapsulated in their most accurate form.
Religion, therefore, is presented by John of Damascus (an earliest student of the Religionswissenschaft) as a composite phenomenon, in which no single negative or positive element describes, let alone exhausts, its content and essence. Not only the general framework, but also each of its components is a complexity in itself. Thus in the Fount of Knowledge, Islam is one, and a minute, component of the composite sense of Religion, and by itself a microcosm of a complex definition which consists of prehistory, history, sources, doctrine, practices and a critique by its student. John of Damascus’ methodology was imitated by later Byzantine anti-Islamic writers but never followed. Of course we have seen that the word Spyoxeta was used also by Abu Qurra and others, but their purpose was more to refute than to present and explain Islam as a religion.
In the way John of Damascus treated Islam, he moved Islam and religion out from the orbit of a racial-political identification of a particular people, to that of an experience of a living faith. The other meaningful characterization of Religion is 9coceGera (reverence for the divine) which Gregory Palamas used for Islam. Palamas spoke of the Muslims as “the most barbarians among the barbarians’, but of Islam (and by implication of Religion) as $eocg6era; the way in which one expresses one’s own awe and reverence to God which may be different from one’s manners. Palamas even called upon his own Christian flock in Thessalonike to take notice and imitate this SeooeGera of the Turks!
The examples of John of Damascus and Gregory Palamas are interesting, and significant: the former because he employs the word in a book of heresies in which he includes Hellenism (i.e. paganism), Zoroastrianism, schools of Greek philosophy, Judaism, Gnostic sects, etc; the latter because the characterization comes from someone who as a captive suffered in the hands of the Muslims, abhorred their manners (experienced, that is, manifestations perhaps of their religion as others would have perceived them), but who also discerned that such manners were not necessarily the essential content of Islam as a faith.
By making this distinction, Gregory Palamas was indirectly suggesting that the conduct of the followers of a religion does not necessarily define the essence of Religion itself. As a mystic and one who in his theology was keen to distinguish between divine essence and energies, or attributes, he was not inconsistent in this regard! Palamas implied that, ideally, conduct should reflect the essence of Religion; as in the hesychastic theology energies are of, and share in the divine essence itself.
The other consideration is that 9oyoxeia and Seoc¢Gera came from two spiritual figures, both of whom were intellectual ascetics and mystics. In treating Islam, they were not driven by military, political considerations, or behavioural manifestations, which yield a limited and distorted sense of the essence of a religious tradition. Both of them treated Islam and religion as a spiritual experience and a way of life. To make such a critical distinction was an even greater challenge during their time in the context of two theocracies battling each other, when religion and social behaviour were seen inseparably and interchangeably.
In summary, Religion although not defined by the Byzantines, is viewed as the substrate of one’s own identity, civilization, culture, ethos, morality and practice; it is one’s own ground of being. To Byzantines and Muslims alike, Religion was a matter of one’s own self-identity and, thus, a matter of life and death! Such a notion of Religion explains the intensity in the Byzantine antiIslamic literature and the ferocity in the Muslim-Byzantine relations.
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