Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (review)

This book undertakes to answer a simple yet profoundly complex question: “Why did militant forms of piety and the figures associated with militant and aggressive modes of religiosity become such crucial resources for communal self-fashioning among early Christian and early Muslim communities?” (p. 4). Not satisfied with the conventional wisdom that asserts unequivocal increases in violence over time, Sizgorich mobilizes an interdisciplinary theoretical framework through which to read the late-ancient archive. His theoretical conversation partners are cultural anthropologist Fredrik Barth, on the processes by which ethnic and communal identities and boundaries are generated and shored up through social, political, and cultural performances and discursive strategies; sociologist Margaret Somers, who emphasizes the role of narrative and especially emplotment in generating stories that groups tell about themselves in relation to their pasts; and historian and sociologist Ronald Grigor Suny, who generates a broader theory about the role of primordialism in communities’ interpretations of their present in light of an almost mythic past. This theoretical frame helps Sizgorich make sense of the privilege accorded stories of persecution, martyrdom, and triumph over enemies in both early Christian and early Muslim communities. It is not that persecution was a routine reality in the empirical experience of early Christians and Muslims; rather, stories about persecution and triumph become the lens through which the past and the present are refracted and the model for the ideal type within each tradition: those who suffer persecution shore up and maintain clear boundaries for the community and function as exemplars for the identity constituted by the boundary.

The book is divided into eight densely populated chapters, four devoted to Christian material and four to Muslim material. Sizgorich’s method involves close reading of exemplary texts, opening a window onto a broader historical and rhetorical terrain. There is nuance and detail in every chapter. Striking similarities emerge: ascetics emerge as the vanguards of violence in both Christian and Muslim contexts, for reasons both practical and ideological. Ascetics, living outside the confines of more conventional social life and on its margins, take on positions of unalloyed certainty and become the guardians of and border guards for the boundaries of the community. Meanwhile, the ascetic’s status is itself shot through with violence so that it should come as no surprise that violence emerges as the ascetic’s preferred mode of expression (p. 130). Since the ascetic acts out of a concordance with the will of God, even the most apparently egregious acts come to be rationalized under the sign of divine authority.

Sizgorich emphasizes an important element of the historical story, one often overshadowed by graphic tales of religiously inflected violence: that is, that there is plenty of evidence that many—perhaps even the majority—of Christians and Muslims were quite content to live peacefully side-by-side with neighbors who worshiped under different divine auspices. Moreover, as Sizgorich shows repeatedly, ordinary people often tried to intervene to interrupt the religious violence of their coreligionists, usually unsuccessfully but not less noteworthy for their failure. As for the history of Islam in this period, Sizgorich offers an illuminating portrait of competing approaches, the rigorist Kharijites on the one hand, and the school of Ibn Hanbal, which sought to defend the boundaries of the umma in nonviolent ways. For this, Sizgorich calls them

that rarest breed of late ancient and medieval fundamentalists, those who approached questions of identity and communal belonging through generally peaceable and humane methods, forsaking whatever temptations to violence resided in the narratives in accordance with which they crafted individual and communal selves.

(p. 20)

At times, more theoretical fluency would have been welcome. Sizgorich is on firmer ground with historian and social scientist interlocutors than with theory grounded in the academic study of religion. Especially when considering matters of religious identity-formation and religious violence, one would have liked to see...