Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam.

• Author: MacEvitt, Christopher H.
• Position: Book review

Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam. By THOMAS SIZGORICH. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2009. Pp. viii + 398. $55.

When Peter Brown wrote his seminal The World of Late Antiquity in 1971, the subtitle of the British edition was "From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad." Since the most defining characteristic of late antiquity is the elevation of Christianity to an imperial religion, historians commonly have ended the period with the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, which brought the Christian domination of the Mediterranean to an end. Yet Brown's subtitle in the U.S. edition was "AD 150-750," which more accurately reflected the scope of the book, encompassing as it did the first century of the Islamic empire. Few scholars, however, have had the training to work in the requisite languages and the vision to be able to see the seventh and eighth centuries in the Islamic world as intimately linked to the fourth and fifth. Thomas Sizgorich's book shows us how it is done.

Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity tackles questions of violence, the maintenance of communal boundaries, and the role of monks, holy men, muj[a.bar]hid[u.bar]n, and theologians in both. As Sizgorich explains, "the abiding concern of this book is to understand why militant forms of piety and the figures associated with militant and aggressive modes of religiosity became such crucial resources for communal self-fashioning among early Christian and early Muslim communities" (p. 4). The central point of the book is clear, and it is a welcome one: Muslims and Christians shared a common store of stories, images, symbols, and values that had their origins in late antiquity. This shared religious culture drew Christians, Jews, and later Muslims together on a daily basis as the communities lived side-by-side, but also caused anxiety about the maintenance of separate identities. The scope and ambition of Sizgorich's book is impressive, especially as a first book. His writing is clear and lively, evoking for his reader Nestorian bishops turned slave-ascetics, murderous Khaw[a.bar]rij, and the seductions of a Christian monastery in Muslim imagination.

The book begins with the sermons of John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407) railing against the Jews of Antioch and, more importantly, against the Christians who associated with them. Like many others, Sigzorich sees in Chrysostom's hectoring a desperate desire to seal the porous boundary between the Christian and Jewish communities in Antioch. While Chrysostom's demonization of the Jewish community is well known, Sizgorich calls attention to what the preacher wanted his congregation to do about it. Rather than confronting or...