Jack Tannous - The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press, 2018):
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.
What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Tannous is also the author of, "Between Christology and Kalam? The Life and Letters of George, Bishop of the Arab Tribes."
Video Title: It's Useful to Know with Dr. Jack Tannous. Source: Center for Culture, Society, and Religion. Date Published: December 1, 2022. Description:
In this episode of It's Useful to Know, Dr. Jack Tannous speaks about the understudied religious experience of "simple believers” in the medieval Middle East, most of whom were illiterate. While elite Christians and Muslims focused on reading and writing texts, simple believers experienced religion through their senses and community. Studying their religious experience, Dr. Tannous shows, helps us understand how fluid religious boundaries could be in this period.
A conversation with Jack Tannous about the "simple believers" who made up the majority of the population of Byzantium (as well as the caliphate and just about any premodern monotheistic society). They probably knew little about the minutiae of theology, but what did they know about their faith, and how important was theology for their religious identity?