In this fascinating book, Jack Tannous sets out to write a new history of the transformation of the Middle East from multilingual and Christian to Arabic-speaking and Islamic. It is well known, at least among historians, that the transformation did not take place as an immediate consequence of the Muslim conquests but took several centuries to materialize. As Tannous points out, however, the corollary of that reality, namely that Christians remained the majority of the population during much of the Middle Ages, is often ignored by specialists of Islamic history, who write about the “religious minority” (i.e., Islam) as if they were the majority. His book investigates how this balance came to change over the centuries, and his central premise is that only by understanding the experience of that silent majority of “simple” Christians can we properly understand the choices they made and the changes they brought about.Tannous advances his argument smoothly and clearly in fourteen chapters grouped in four sections, and a long conclusion. In part 1 he clarifies and discusses his approach and method. The history of the early medieval Middle East, he rightly says, has been written on the basis of texts written by religious leaders. His book takes the same texts, but looks at them against the grain, in “an effort to put flesh on the unseen contexts that swirl around such texts” (3). This involves recognizing the importance of the vast majority of “overwhelmingly agrarian, mostly illiterate” believers with “little understanding of the theological complexities” of contemporary debates so prominent in the texts written by their leaders. These are the “simple believers” of the subtitle. In two chapters entitled “Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy” (chap. 1) and “The Simple and the Learned” (chap. 2), Tannous offers a nuanced and illuminating discussion of the levels of literacy, the interest and understanding of theological differences, and what he calls the “layering of knowledge,” a phrase that has already established itself among specialists and that describes the varied and often creative ways in which individual simple believers engaged with theology in a world of competing theological statements. In this engagement, the relationship of trust between the simple and the learned was essential.Under the general heading “Consequences of Chalcedon,” part 2 contains a series of chapters reflecting on the complex religious situation that followed the doctrinal decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, taken against the position of many eastern bishops. This occasioned lasting divisions between Christian churches, most prominent and enduring in the Middle East, where further subdivisions arose over time as different groups reacted differently to attempts at reconciliation or refined their doctrine in diverse ways. Tannous posits that the theological hair-splitting was too complex for simple believers to follow in detail and suggests a number of different avenues to explain their adherence to one or the other group. The five chapters that make up this section first discuss the pervasive fluidity and “messiness” of the religious situation on the ground, showing through an impressive wealth of examples the lack of stability in the membership of the different groups, the interest of the average believers in the practical aspects of their salvation—for example, by partaking in the sacraments, even if it was from a dissenting priest—and the importance of family and village networks in determining allegiance. Yet this did not mean there was a lack of interest in the contested theology, says Tannous: at their simplified level, the simple did engage in debates and take sides, often as a result of “propagandistic” stories and sermons that clerics circulated, but also through the sheer control over the means of salvation that a given church could exert locally. The rise of monastic schools and their role in streamlining religious competition and framing community formation through education close this section.Here Tannous inserts an “Interlude” (chap. 8), discussing individual and institutional continuities over what has been termed the “long” late antiquity—that is, the one that includes the early Islamic period. It is largely a reflection on the continuity of learning and culture, and it sets up the last two sections (parts 3 and 4), which contain the core argument of the book. Titled “Christians and Muslims” and “The Making of the Medieval Middle East” respectively, they explore the issue of conversion to Islam and argue that the process was slower, and the transformation much less dramatic than usually thought. Tannous first argues in two chapters that, just like the Christians of their time, the Muslims were many and varied, and also relied on a mass of simple believers whose understanding of theological detail was tenuous (chap. 9 “A House with Many Mansions,” and chap. 10 “A Religion with a Thousand Faces”). These were members of the same cultural universe as their fellow simple believers in the Christian groups of the region, and they shared a host of symbols and rituals that ensured they sometimes had more in common than their leaders would have us believe. In the four remaining chapters, Tannous makes a compelling argument for a sort of tacit partnership of the simple, who stubbornly continued to share their long-standing cultural habitus and social rituals across the religious borders neatly drawn for them by the learned—or indeed by political leaders.To support his views, Tannous brings an impressive wealth of evidence from a wide variety of sources. The sheer quantity of information he has been able to squeeze out of otherwise known sources, let alone several less-known ones, is staggering. The simple of the early medieval Middle East will forever be in his debt. Yet the simple in this book also suffer from the same predicament as women, so to speak: their history is written through the eyes of others. The elite and learned authors to whom they are constantly opposed are the only voices we hear, so that the picture painted by the author is probably less “non-elitist” (8) than we would like. Tannous is conscious of this issue, and in appendix 1 he notes that his information comes from “sometimes hostile, patronizing, or unsympathetic religious elites” (509). He proceeds to argue that a careful reading of those texts allows us to recover the reality behind the bias. This argument is entirely valid, insofar as it concerns the topics raised by the sources in question. Those authors, however, were only interested in some aspects of the experience of the average Christians, and only mentioned them in relation to those aspects—mostly in the context of their religious behavior. What this means is not so much that our information is wrong, but that it is incomplete. It does not tell us anything about the nonreligious concerns of the simple believers or what those concerns represented proportionally in their everyday lives.To be sure, the voices of the non-elite members of those societies are not easy to access directly, and Tannous has done an impressive job collecting their echoes, even if they are selective and in indirect speech. It is a shame, in this context, that he has entirely ignored the thousands of everyday documents on papyrus and other materials that are preserved from that period, where those voices can be heard much more directly.1 Even admitting that everyday documents are mediated to some extent by the style and agency of the village scribes, they nevertheless reflect the attitudes and concerns of “simple believers” without the selection and filter applied on those concerns by the learned authors who report on them. Recent work on rural Christian communities based on those documents shows that on the whole, interreligious and interfaith issues were quite far from their everyday worries—and this was true in the period following Chalcedon as it was in the early Islamic period. Even personal letters between members of the same family rarely mention—or even allude to—religious debates and rival groups. Their interaction with clerics and monks was usually related to protection against abuse from powerful villagers or the authorities, sometimes about family disputes, and more rarely religious questions of very down-to-earth relevance. To a large extent, this material agrees with Tannous's positions and would have greatly reinforced, but also nuanced, his argument.2This is a book that will sit on the desks of social historians of the eastern Mediterranean for the foreseeable future. The footnotes alone have the potential to initiate several new research projects, as do the detailed discussions of case studies in individual chapters and the engaging style in which Tannous writes. Like the learned clerics of the medieval Middle East, he excels in persuasive rhetoric and transmits his enthusiasm in a very compelling manner. Even if his truth can be contested in its details, ultimately his message is incontrovertible: if they had not convinced the masses of simple believers, the sophisticated religious leaders of the time would have spent decades discussing theology in an ivory tower with little effect on historical change.