Damascus after the Muslim ConquestText and Image in Early Islam

Abstract

This book is a study of Islamic identity in Damascus, Syria, from its fall to Muslim armies in 635–6 ad until the end of its tenure as the capital of the Islamic Empire in 750. It discusses the shift from late antique to Islamic culture in the eastern Mediterranean. Even as continuity with the world of late antiquity persisted into the early Islamic period, the formation of Islamic identity in Syria was effected by the specific agents who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. This book presents literary, material, and social aspects of early Islamic identity as construed by architects, pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians. While most studies of this period admit that an important and nuanced transformation of culture took place from Byzantium to early Islam, this work focuses specifically on narrative and the constitution of identity in the dynamic landscape of the early Islamic Mediterranean. By contributing to our understanding of how the narrative work of medieval historians shaped and constituted social identity, in conjunction with analysis of evidence from the material world in which people lived and to which they related, this book is a fresh approach to the early Islamic period. It moves the study of Islamic origins beyond discussions that focus exclusively on issues of authenticity and source criticism to an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, compelling story telling, and the interpretation of material culture.