The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers by Jack Tannous (review)

Most surviving texts we have from late antiquity and the medieval period are of a religious character, written mainly by and for members of Christian and Muslim communities that shared the world of the Middle East in these periods. These texts include ecclesiastical histories, canonical pronouncements, lives of saints, the works of Muslim historiographers, and the Islamic ḥadīth tradition, to name a few. Yet, the majority of these sources are often elitist. Written in the aftermath of religious and political key events such as the council of Chalcedon (451) and the Arab conquests of the mid-seventh century, such religious literature is often imbued with confessional propaganda, assumes a high level of interest and knowledge of doctrine, and is often written for the consumption of religious elites and for the purpose of maintaining communal boundaries among communities. The downside of this uneven nature of the sources is that our perception of the world created by the council of Chalcedon and/or the Arab conquests can easily overlook the majority of Christians and Muslims living at the time, who did not fully understand the religious controversies that split their world into rival groups.

Attention to the so-called "simple believers" (3) and the underestimated differential or "layering" of religious knowledge in the medieval Middle East (2) lies at the heart of The Making of the Medieval Middle East by Jack Tannous, a tour de force and a much-needed corrective to many narrow assumptions about the world as it was after Chalcedon and after the Arab conquests.

From the outset, Tannous makes it clear that the book is about two interconnected but distinct worlds. "This book is about the world the Arabs encountered when they conquered the Middle East in the mid-seventh century and the world those conquests created" (1). This double interest in the two formative periods for later medieval Middle Eastern history stands behind the plan of the work, described clearly and succinctly in the introduction. The first of the work's four parts is "Simple Belief" (9–81), where Tannous skillfully brings to life those "simple believers" of the post-Chalcedonian world, a population that was "overwhelmingly agrarian with higher-level religious instruction and sophisticated theological literature likely not in great supply (or any supply) in most areas" (14–15). Through an examination of the questions of literacy, theological literacy, and access to books, Tannous paints a vivid picture of simple Christians in the post-Chalcedonian world, how they related to the sophisticated theological disagreements of their time, and how the learned churchmen of their various communities related to their own constituencies. This essential beginning of the book sets the stage for the remainder of the work, where the formative period of the medieval Middle East is examined mainly with an eye toward the simple majority. Part 2, "Consequences of Chalcedon" (83–198), applies this perspective to the world after the ecclesiastical council of Chalcedon in 451. Here, Tannous fleshes out the effects of this key event in Church history on the communal realities in the Middle East until the mid-seventh century. According to Tannous, this was a time of fierce competition among rival Christian factions, which "helped fuel debates, the composition of polemics, the translation of texts, the creation of educational institutions, and the development of a Syriac-language syllabus of study (among Miaphysites) in the seventh century" (3). An interesting interlude on the "Question of Continuity" constitutes chapter 8 (199–221), where the author focuses on the question of continuity between the periods of Roman and Arab rule (ca. sixth–ninth centuries) through an abundance of Syriac sources from the period. Tannous contends that this period was one of marked continuity on the cultural level, made possible through a noticeable movement of translating and adapting of the classical Greco-Roman heritage, albeit often mediated by the ecclesiastical patristic tradition.

In part 3, "Christians and Muslims" (223–428), the discussion...