Visiting Research Scholar Lecture: Monks, Manuscripts, and Muslims: Early Christian Reactions to the Rise of Islam

When Muslims first encountered Christians, they did not meet Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from Northern Mesopotamia who spoke an Aramaic dialect called Syriac. These Syriac Christians were under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present day and wrote the earliest, most extensive Christian accounts of Islam. Nevertheless, because so few scholars read Syriac, there has been little analysis of these sources. “Monks, Manuscripts, and Muslims” examines five ancient Syriac manuscripts. It explores how these works’ content and the ways later readers modified their text help us rethink the earliest encounters of the modern world’s two largest religions. The lecture is aimed not solely for specialists in antiquity, but also for those more broadly interested in Christian-Muslim relations as well as those interested in manuscript culture and the pre-modern history of the book.

Michael Penn received his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Duke University where he also obtained a certificate in Women's Studies. Dr. Penn currently teaches at Mount Holyoke College and is a specialist in the history of early Christianity, especially that of Christians who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Penn's current research focuses on the reaction of Syriac speaking Christians to the rise of Islam. While at ISAW he will be finishing a book entitled Imaging Islam. This project asks how our understanding of early Christian-Muslim relations and of early Islam would change were we to move Syriac sources from the periphery to the center of historical analysis. Dr. Penn is also interested more broadly in late antique and early medieval manuscript culture. Currently he is collaborating with a computer scientist at Smith College to apply recent advances in digital handwriting recognition to the analysis of ancient texts.

To RSVP, please email isaw@nyu.edu.