Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond

Stories between Christianity and Islam offers an original and nuanced understanding of Christian–Muslim relations that shifts focus back from worn-out discussions of superiority, conflict, and appropriation to the living world of connectivity and creativity. The late antique and medieval Near East is often defined as a world of stories shared by Christians and Muslims. Public storytelling was a key feature for these late antique Christian and early Islamic communities, where men and women used the stories of saints to publicly interpret the past, comment on the present, and envision the future. In this book, Reyhan Durmaz uses these stories to demonstrate and analyze the mutually constitutive relationship between these two religions in the Middle Ages. With an in-depth study of storytelling in late antiquity and the mechanisms of hagiographical transmission between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages, Durmaz develops a nuanced understanding of saints’ stories as a tool for building identity, memory, and authority across confessional boundaries.