Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text and Image in Early Islam (review)

Today, the Umayyads make a more appealing subject to Western historians than to historians from the Islamic world because this first Islamic dynasty, though proudly Arab and vigorously involved in the spreading of Islam, has been increasingly acknowledged for its continuation of the practices and structures of Late Antiquity. Having chosen Bilad al-Sham (the Roman Oriens or the Holy Land), a thoroughly Christianized country, as their seat, the Umayyads both appropriated and were influenced by the composite religious, cultural, and material and artistic features in this former Byzantine land. Many scholars have argued this point so compellingly that the currently accepted end date for Late Antiquity is the early Abbasid period.

In Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, Khalek wants to problematize the continuity discourse by insisting that the Umayyads’ identity itself was molded within the confines of Byzantine culture in Syria. The place, its history, religious traditions, myths, and material culture, as well as the competition between the Muslim ruling minority and the Christian majority over the narratives that transmitted that heritage, are all fundamental in the formation of the Umayyad Islamic identity. In fact, Khalek pushes her argument in time to show that even centuries after the passing of the Umayyads, their memory in Syria, and the place of Syria itself in the Islamic sacred cosmology, were being refashioned against ideological and military threats using the same images and narrative techniques originally adopted from the local, Christian and Byzantine, milieu. Her main source for that contention is Ibn ‘Asakir’s Tarkih Dimashq (the History of Damascus), the most famous compendium on Damascus composed in the twelfth century. But she also judiciously uses earlier, fragmented, and lesser-known “narratives,” some of which have never been questioned, for their portrayal of Syrian-Islamic culture in its earliest manifestations.

Unlike many of her predecessors among social historians, Khalek uses both textual and pictorial/architectural evidence to build her thesis, although her handling of the latter material is less effective than her handling of the former. For her visual and architectural analyses, she depends on secondary sources, which come with their agendas and shortcomings, whereas her dealing with primary texts is direct, probing, and masterfully innovative. Narrative and iconography are the two main theoretical framers of her evidence. She deftly, though in a manner suggestive of a dissertation, constructs the semantic domains of both terms as they have evolved in recent critical thinking. She then foregrounds those theoretical constructs as a way to organize her analysis. She uses this strategy to examine texts, images, and buildings for what they can tell us about the multifarious processes by which the Umayyads, and the early Muslims in general, made sense of their cultural and ideological place in Syria, and at the same time appropriated that place to build their visions of themselves, their identity, and their religion.

Along the way, late Antique and Byzantine patterns were not only appropriated; they were transformed and, in a profound way, “Islamified,” though not beyond recognition. The traces of their Late Antique roots remained discernible throughout the centuries between the Umayyads and the Crusades. They were then firmly incorporated in the official narratives of Islamic Damascus and its position within the constellation of Islamic sacred cities. Thus, Khalek wants us to remember that within the familiar representations of medieval Damascus as a sanctified city, proud of its material and discursive connections with early Islamic history and its makers, and resplendent with its contributions to Islamic learning and asceticism, lies a kernel of images and texts formed through both a conscious and spontaneous dialogue with the city’s Late Antique legacy.