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This chapter introduces some of the traditional methodological and historiographical challenges to the social and cultural history of Late Antique and early Islamic Syria. It proposes a new approach to literary and source criticism that focuses on narrative as a lens for the interpretation of culture in the Classical Islamic world. It also situates Damascus in its late antique and early Byzantine milieu, providing an interdisciplinary perspective on the transition to Islam in the medieval Mediterranean. The chapter introduces the case studies that form the remainder of the book, and explains the rationale for the approach taken to pair a theoretical approach with individual case studies of the literature, cult practice, and sacred geography of Damascus.

Pursuing the references to ‘Arabs’ in the Islamic-era poetry examined in Chapter 2, this chapter explores the processes by which Arab identity developed as a new form of community in early Islam. Analysis begins with the Qur’an, the first extant text to use the word ʿarabī to describe itself. It is revealed that the Qur’an’s Arabness is not a marker of ethnic identity, but it does mark key shifts which were amplified by new social processes following the Muslim Conquests. Employing models of ethnogenesis to interpret early Islam, this chapter demonstrates how the spread of Muslim communities and the centralisation of the Caliphate fostered an environment conducive to rethinking identities. The new social processes prompted early Muslims to experiment with various terms to define their community, and ‘Arab’ gradually gained traction during the later Umayyad period. The rise of Arabness as an ethnic identity thus closely intertwines with the maturation of Muslim community, but conflicting social pressures and imperfect communal cohesion meant that Umayyad-era Arab identity developed very unevenly in this formative period.

Capital punishment can be understood as simultaneously an exercise of actual power – the ending of a human life – and an exertion of symbolic, or ritual, power.1 In this combination of symbolic transformation with real physical change, executions are unusual rituals. But the use of extreme violence against the human body certainly does have ritual characteristics, in that it has established rules (which may, of course, be deliberately challenged or broken) and in that these rules are used to make the drastic transformation in the status of the executed party seem legitimate and proper, to reassert more general ideas about the correct social order and to communicate threats and warnings to others who might seek to upset it. The victim of the execution is quite literally marked out as beyond reintegration into society. Their body becomes a kind of text, which can be read in a multitude of ways: the authorities carrying out the killing usually have one set of messages in mind, but the victim themselves, and those who witness or remember the act, may have very different ideas.

This article argues that in the early period after the Arab conquest, the primary communal self-ascription of the rural Christian population was to their village communities, and that authority was still firmly in the hands of secular elites. Based on evidence from papyri, this contradicts the later narrative sources which give the church a preponderant position in communal leadership – a reality they retroject from the ninth century and later, when they were composed.

This chapter analyzes Jacopo de Varagine's chronicle of Genoese history. He concluded the saints' lives in the Golden Legend with an entry on Pope Pelagius I (556–61). This entry has almost nothing to say about Pelagius but is instead an essay in which Jacopo briefly summarizes western European history. Scholars reckon that Jacopo added this entry while thinking about how he would begin writing the history of Genoa. Perhaps an indication of his later writing, this entry serves as a window on how his mind worked, especially his reading habits and style of subject selection. The chronicle of Genoese history is hardly a work of secularism; Jacopo did not perceive the world as divided into categories of sacred and secular history. The chapter also highlights Jacopo's well-informed summary of early Islam.

The epilogue draws out the common threads in all three traditions—Byzantine Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and early Islam—and shows how they survive in the contemporary world. In political conflicts, dreams are still sometimes used as justifications for military action, especially by jihadists and others keen to incite inter-religious conflict. Online evidence shows that dream discourses are still being interpreted and appropriated by some contemporary Christian and Islamic believers as tools of providence and divine revelation. Unlike the post-Freudian understanding of dreams as reflections of individual psychic processes of the unconscious, dreams had both individual and social significance in the Byzantine tradition, and in the Islamic tradition up to the current day. Immense semiotic power was thus given to a medium that was able to be misrepresented and manipulated at will. This has always been the problem with dreams and is probably the main reason why they are discounted in most post-Enlightenment societies, but not by all. The chapter asks whether such dreams are important to certain fundamentalist religious cultures because they give equal opportunities to men and women to mediate divine judgement and participate vicariously in violence. It closes with an assessment of current trends in Islam and evangelical Christianity.

This chapter provides the first edition and translation of an early eighth-century documentary text on marble found in the course of excavations at the Late Antique/early Islamic town of Andarīn in modern-day northern Syria. As well as presenting the text itself, which is of a fiscal nature, the author considers various related issues, such as the identity of the sender of the document, the archaeological context of its discovery, the practice of writing on marble, the history of Andarīn and its relationship to nearby settlements (especially Khanāṣir/Anasartha), early Islamic fiscal practice, and the activities of the Umayyad family in northern Syria.

This chapter analyzes how female figures relate to events in the nascent Muslim polity—in its emerging theological discourses, its normative social practices, and its encounters with other religiously identified polities. Moving roughly chronologically through the revelation of Qur’anic surahs, the chapter focuses on narratives in which women are involved in the establishment of communal moral and legal precedents, such as in the case of a slander against a righteous woman. This heuristic brings to light ways in which female personalities serve as exemplars of vice and virtue against the backdrop of a religious polity in formation. The chapter argues that the Qur’an regularly depicts female moral and spiritual excellence and is often proactively engaged with affairs of direct importance for girls and women. At the same time, certain female figures exercise their agency only to their own detriment. The chapter highlights how narratives involving biblical figures feature prominently in the Qur’an during a period in which the Prophet Muḥammad was attempting to forge political alliances grounded in a sense of theological kinship. In this context, the Qur’an depicts the women of the Prophet Muḥammad’s family as continuing a legacy of exemplary biblical women figures.

Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī was founded as a madīna by caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik. It is one of the largest Umayyad aristocratic settlements of the Syrian Steppe. Between 2002 and 2011, extensive fieldwork was conducted there by a Syrian-Swiss mission, with a strong focus on agricultural features and water systems, on structures with an economic role, and on vernacular architecture around the caliphal palace. Fieldwork also included the almost complete excavation of another aristocratic residence called Building E, which might have been a direct predecessor of the caliphal palace. This chapter aims at presenting up-to-date information about the plan of the latter structure, at discussing further some elements of its decoration, especially two carved stucco panels bearing caliphal representations, and at introducing new hypotheses for the history of the site in the early eighth century.