From Byzantium to early Islam: Studies on Damascus in the Umayyad Era

This dissertation is a study of Damascus during the period of passage from Byzantium to early Islam. I have subtitled the thesis "Studies on Damascus in the Umayyad Era" to indicate the specificity of the chapters. Each comprises a study of a particular monument, residential pattern, saint's cult, scholarly circle, or historical discourse.

Part one explores the physical landscape in Damascus. Chapter one addresses Christian-Muslim conflict, as it is cast through the lens of a story of confrontation between a monk and a caliph which serves as a foil for the political and religious tension in the city during the construction of the city's Great Mosque.

Chapter two is a study of residential acquisition in Damascus and its surrounding countryside. Muslim-Christian confrontation is played out in terms of property and land-use. At the end of this chapter, I demonstrate patterns of property distribution after the conquests, and the place the Christian Arab tribe Ghassān occupied, geographically and culturally, in a middle-zone between Arabia and Syria.

Part two explores the sacred landscape of the city and the cult of the saints. In particular, in chapter three I discuss the cult of John the Baptist, analyze renditions of the discovery of relics associated with that figure and couch his cult in the larger context of Islamic views of object veneration in the formative period of Islam.

Part three concentrates on historical landscapes. In chapter four I foreground Ghassānids who remained in Syria after the conquests. There they joined the burgeoning practice of historical writing. This chapter analyzes the contribution of two Ghassānid families of scholars and analyzes their role in the development of a Syrian school of historical writing.

Chapter five is a discussion of a "discourse of incommensurability" in Islamic late antiquity as evinced by the Futūh al-Shām of Abū Ismā`īl al-Azdī. The discourse was centered on accusations and refutations of Arab and Muslim inferiority to Byzantine culture. The process by which early Syrian historiography incorporated Byzantine literary tropes exhibits the tendency of these Christian and Muslim communities to collide and collude, inasmuch as their conflicts were born of their cohabitation in a single physical and cultural space.