Source in the Spotlight
The Co-Production of Early Islam in the Maronite Chronicle
Source in the Spotlight
The Co-Production of Early Islam in the Maronite Chronicle
A short Syriac Christian world chronicle, written around the year 665 AD, takes on new significance as a unique witness to the co-production of earliest Islam. Its details reveal a fascinating transitional period in which Arab caliphs could pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Mary’s tomb, adjudicate inter-Christian theological disputes, and mint coins with crosses for their majority-Christian subjects. These details have turned the so-called Maronite Chronicle, which would otherwise be deeply obscure, into a priceless resource for historians of earliest Islam, and have even led to its use in online Christian polemics against Islam.
Event: International Conference
Conference: Co-producing Heresies: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
September 1–4, 2024 Schloss Münchenwiler (CH)
Learn moreEvent: International Conference
Conference: Co-produced Rituals between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Uncovering a Common Late Antique and Early Medieval Religious Culture
April 2–3, 2025 Bern, Switzerland
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Who we are
The project is coordinated by Katharina Heyden, Professor for Ancient History of Christianity and Interreligious Encounters at the University of Bern (Switzerland), and David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (U.S.), and includes a network of collaborators across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
New Case Study
Religious Markers on the Graves: Co-produced Displays of Religious Affiliation in Late Antique Cemeteries
From the 3rd century CE, new religious images emerged, arguably in line with the growing rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. One of the places where these new visual vocabularies could be used was in cemeteries, and in particular in the catacombs. These sites, shared by individuals from different religious backgrounds and supplied by the same workshops, were places of familial and individual expression, and, most importantly, were not administered by religious authorities, unlike what became the norm in the West during the Middle Ages. A strongly delimited canon of funerary imagery had not yet emerged, and there was thus in this early period more room for selection from a wider variety of cultural and religious motifs, making for an interesting laboratory wherein modern scholars can see how the selections of families of different faiths inter-related and sometimes co-produced.