Umayyad Christianity
Subtitle: John of Damascus as a contextual example of identity formation in early Islam
By: Najib George Awad
Series: Islamic history and thought -- 12; Islamic history and thought -- 12.
Publisher: Gorgias Press
Published: 2018
Place of publication: Piscataway, NJ, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 472
ISBN-13: 9781463207571
Subjects: History; Christians; Identification (Religion); Christianity and culture; Christianity and other religions; Islam; Relations; Christianity; Interfaith relations
Description: "A study of the identity-formation process that the Christians of Syria-Palestine experienced during Umayyad Caliphate. It approaches this subject by using John of Damascus and his writings on Islam as a case-study. This provides an exhaustive study of the available historical data in order to stimulate some further thought on John of Damascus's theology and legacy from a contextual and intercultural methodology. Such an examination has not yet been pursued in the scholarship of Byzantine Christianity during that era. Proceeding from a centralizing 'context', the monograph revisits John of Damascus's legacy (and the Umayyad Christians' identity-formation of that era) from the perspective of his historical, Islamic-Arabic context, and not from any assumed, metanarrative, common to contemporary pro-Byzantine theology scholars." --
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 421-464) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introducing the case; title: On contextuality in historical-theological reasoning: a brief methodological exposition; title: Who was John of Damascus? Or, centralizing Sitz im Leben; title: Yannah Manṣūr ad-Dimashqī b. Sarjūn b. Manṣūr ar-Rūmī, the inhabitant of Damascus; title: John of Damascus's Greek writings in the context of Umayyad Syria-Palestine; title: Umayyad Christianity: forming identity in a changing Sitz im Leben.