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"A novel work on orality and the circulation of stories in medieval Islamic lands. This book has the potential to inflect the conversations on intercultural transmission that have held center stage in the field for the past couple of decades."—Arietta Papaconstantinou, Associate Professor of Ancient History, University of Reading
"Durmaz performs the daunting task of developing for a wide, inter-disciplinary audience the ground-breaking, specialist research of Angelika Neuwirth and Aziz al-Azmeh. Like them, Durmaz works against scholarly obsession with the written text. She retraces transmission, instead, through situated storytelling, a practice which in her treatment is revealed as the most synthetic cultural act of the late antique and paleo-Islamic period."—Elizabeth Key Fowden, Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Classics and Fellow, Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.
“A superb, original piece of scholarship…Durmaz’s engaging text offers a welcome innovative perspective on ‘Abrahamic’ scriptural and hagiographic narrative arts. From the broader phenomenon of orality in the transmission of stories generally to the more specific details and ‘canonical’ requirements of recitation, this is a significant detailed analysis of a multi-faceted performative dimension."—John Renard, Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University
"An innovative and important contribution to the rich and rapidly growing body of scholarship on medieval Christian-Muslim relations. Reyhan Durmaz's focus on the universal human practice of storytelling as the site of flows of information between Christians and Muslims is excellent and will open up this line of investigation to future researchers."—Jack Tannous, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University
“Reyhan Durmaz gives a fascinating tour of storytelling about saints that goes well beyond oral-written divides. Her analysis of narratives in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages shows how communities of Christians and Muslims shared stories and adapted them in complex ways, changing their own ground truths in the process.”—Sarah Bowen Savant, author of The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion
About the author
Reyhan Durmaz is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-translator of Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met.
