Paul Ulishney, "New Evidence for Conversion to Islam in Anastasius of Sinai’s Hodegos," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 78 (2024), 29-48.
Abstract:
Contrary to the judgment of earlier scholars, who suggested that all that could be found concerning early Islam in the writings of Anastasius of Sinai had already been discovered, this article unearths new evidence for conversion to Islam in Anastasius’s Hodegos: a list of aporiai raised by those “who now apostatize from Christianity.” I argue that these apostates should be understood as Christian converts to Islam, and that the aporiai themselves shed new light on the nature and content of the earliest Christian–Muslim disputations. In the context of other evidence for early Islamic belief in other seventh-century Christian authors, Anastasius’s aporiai distinguish themselves by offering evidence for the actual intellectual content of Christian–Muslim disputation, rather than words put into the mouths of fictional Muslim interlocutors. The unique nature of this evidence also parochializes traditional conceptions of Christian–Muslim disputation in the Middle Ages, i.e., that of the “monk in the emir’s majlis.” Instead, they offer us a likelier portrait of what Christian–Muslim disputations may have looked like in the earliest days: Greek-speaking converts to Islam engaging in aporetic questioning on the subject of the Greek Christian scriptures with members of their old faith.
Read the full article here.