Rethinking The “People of the Book”

Abby Kulisz, Sacred Friendship, Holy Hatred: Christian-Muslim Encounters with the Book in the Medieval Middle East (PhD Dissertation, Indiana University, 2022).

A genre of eighteenth-century literature known as an “it-narrative” tells the stories of objects from the first-person perspective. From the it-narrator of a History of a Bible, we learn about its lonely days on the shelf of a bookseller to the exciting moment when a buyer finally “liberates” it from boredom. We also listen as the book tells us about its suffering and wounds inflicted at the hands of careless owners who rip its pages out, stomp on it, and break its binding. It-narratives embody what book historian Leah Price identifies as the “simple fact that reading is only one among many uses to which printed matter can be put.”[1] In it-narratives, books take part in activities far outside of the scope of reading—they are manufactured, bought, sold, left on shelves, and so on. Reading is only one dimension of the life of a book.

Like it-narratives, late ancient and medieval Christians thought of books as more than objects to be read; they too told stories about books as objects with robust lives of their own. My dissertation, Sacred Friendship, Holy Hatred: Christian-Muslim Encounters with the Book in the Medieval Middle East, explores how Middle Eastern Christians, writing in the seventh to tenth centuries, conceived of sharing a book with Muslims. These Christians, who wrote the very first accounts of early Islam, noticed that Muslims also had a book, one whose contents overlapped with their own books. More than a material entity, Christians took the “book” as a way to understand this new people. They composed disputations, histories of the Qurʾān’s origins, and theological treatises that engage with the book of the other. In this way, I take “book” to resonate with what critical theorist Bruno Latour has termed a “matter of concern” or an object fraught with interest and affective weight.

As Christians used “book” to think about Muslims, they found themselves intertwined with them as both friends and enemies. Christians’ friendship with Muslims is attested to in the Qurʾān itself, which identifies Christians as members of a protected group, the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb). Yet, the Qurʾān is also critical of this group and reprimands them for adhering to mistaken beliefs such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. I argue that Christians conceived of Muslims in similar terms to the Qurʾān’s “People of the Book.” Like the Qurʾān, in other words, Christians too imagined belonging—whether in the form of friendship or hostility—through the book. But Christians must reckon with another community who also expresses concern over the book: Jews. Christians already shared a long history with Jews, one tainted with threats of violence and accusations of scriptural tampering. How did Christians reconcile an old relationship of hostility with Jews while envisioning a new relationship with Muslims?

In my exploration of “book” in the Christian imaginary, I lay out critical terms and define the theoretical contours of this study in chapter one. What, exactly, is the elusive “book” that Christians and Muslims debated? I explain the precedent for the book in Syriac late antiquity (namely in the writings of Ephrem the Syrian), how it appears in the Qurʾān, and other conceptual possibilities for conceiving of this object. Could we take the book to be an actor in its own right? How do premodern authors express attachments to books—whether to their own scriptures or the scripture of the “other”? I also consider “belonging” and what it means in the context of this study. How do Christians think about their relationship to other communities, theologically, socially, and ethnically? I survey Christian-Jewish disputations such as the second century Dialogue with Trypho to consider how Christians engaged with a previous other.

In the second chapter, I reach forward to the ninth century world of Timothy I, head of the Church of the East. Timothy was an avid letter writer and his most famous letter, the Disputation with the Caliph al-Mahdī, presents a striking account of a debate he purportedly engaged with the Islamic caliph al-Mahdī. As Timothy was a visitor in al-Mahdī’s court, it is likely that the letter is his retelling of the debate with the caliph. I argue that Timothy uses “book” to imagine and construct a scriptural relationship with Muslims. Taking a cue from Sara Ahmed’s theory of “affective economies,”[2] I show how Timothy harnesses an old fear of Jews as corrupters of scripture to create a new friendship with Muslims. Ahmed’s work on affect theory is instructive, as it posits that emotion does not so much reside within persons but is a force that creates the very communities we see ourselves within and the boundaries of “us” versus “them.” By protecting the shared book against the threat of Jewish tampering, Timothy aligns Christians and Muslims together as friends, united in solidarity against a common enemy.

Chapter three takes on the perspective of the book in the Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā, an influential and widely circulated Christian retelling of the Qurʾān’s origins. I track the formation of the Qurʾān at the hands of Sergius Baḥīrā, an eccentric Christian monk, who appears in both Islamic biographies of Muhammad (known as sīra literature) and Christian counter-narratives. Throughout the Legend, the Qurʾān takes various forms. It is first spoken as a recitation, written down, placed on the horn of a cow, recited aloud, stolen, plagiarized, burned, and then written all over again. I show how book functioned as an entity of belonging that one must have to be a legitimate people. Sergius creates an inferior book for Muslims, granting them access to an inferior form of belonging, but denies the book from Jews and instead makes them corrupters of scripture. Tracing the book through the hands of Sergius and Muhammad and into the hands of a malicious Jewish scribe who tampers with the book shows how the Legend connects belonging to textual processes.

In the next chapter, I explore further the implications of a community’s use of book to forge and establish its parameters. To rethink “polemical” as a classification for Christian writings about early Islam, I introduce Joan Scott’s concept of “fantasy”[3] and use it to read a Syriac disputation known as John and the Emir. Reading John and the Emir as a fantasy shows how Christian writers envisioned a singular and unified Christian community through a singular book. This envisioning of a universal community, however, is only made possible through an appeal to the enduring fantasy of Jews as “other.” In this final chapter, I turn to a Muslim writer, the ninth century historian al-Ṭabarī, namely his commentary on the Qurʼān (tafsīr). Like John and the Emir, al-Ṭabarī uses the story of the Qurʾān’s compilation to create an account of communal unity. But to lay claim to the book, al-Ṭabarī must employ an “other” just as John and the Emir appeals to a fantasy of Jews as the perpetual enemy of Christians. Al-Ṭabarī uses Hafṣa, the fourth wife of Muhammad known for safeguarding the Qurʾān, to make his vision of the Muslim community a male one.

This chapter also asks what scholarly investments we have in the book and the stories we tell about books. I conclude with the linking of Ruqayya Khan’s contemporary work on Hafṣa to the scholarly fantasies we create to put ourselves in continuity with historical persons and objects. I show how Khan appeals to fantasy, in Joan Scott’s terms, to rehabilitate Hafṣa from her marginalization by male scholars, who have persistently excluded her from their histories of the Qurʾān’s compilation. I highlight the shared emotion that Khan harnesses from Hafṣa’s original protection of the Qurʾān in the seventh century, thus situating herself within a history of Muslim women who have protected the Qurʾān with the same intensity and resolve from the threat of male hands. Expanding on Scott’s theorization of fantasy, I point out how the transmission of emotion is essential in the creation of fantasy. It is not so much the image of a fantasy that is harnessed in the writing of history but precisely the affective dimensions of that fantasy.

Perhaps it is possible to tell this story from the lens of “identity,” which has been a common way to approach the study of early Christians and their “others.”[4] Isn’t this simply the story of Christians forging a communal identity against a new people? It is my argument that taking “book”—an entity that I intentionally leave ambiguous—as a starting point tells this story differently. As the central object of concern, I show how we can see multiple, divergent ways that Christians lived among a different group of people, and how they affectively understood their relationship with this people beyond simplistic designations such as “polemical.” By thinking with premodern Christians as they imagined Muslims and Jews, we can also take a reflexive look at ourselves in the present. How and why do we identify with objects, particularly those from the past? Do we see ourselves as defenders and protectors of these objects, thus standing in continuity with people who lived in worlds distant from our own? What do our affective attachments to these objects say about our present concerns? And finally, what does it mean to write a story of the shared book in the present day?

[1] Leah Price, “From The History of a Book to a ‘History of the Book’” Representations 108 no. 1 (2009), 120. 

[2] Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39; see also The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).

[3]Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[4] My study draws upon insights from the work of Maia Kotrosits, who has offered a compelling challenge to the use of “early Christian identity” and calls upon scholars to consider the “social-affective landscape” of ancient literature. Attending to textual affective residue helps us better understand the complex emotional lives of the historical communities who composed this literature. See Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Kotrosits’ work on materiality also informs this study, particularly her theorization of the “real” in ancient literature and how “real” objects live on in both the imaginations of ancient authors and in modern scholarly fantasies. See The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience, and the Real in the History of Early Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Abby Kulisz is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University.