Reyhan Durmaz is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the cultural history of Christianity in the medieval Middle East. Her first book, Stories between Christianity and Islam (2022) examines the transmissions of saints’ stories between Christian and Muslim communities. Her book was shortlisted for the AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions Award and the AAR Award for Excellence in the Study of Religions (Historical Studies). Reyhan is currently writing her second book on the relationship between soldiers, paramilitary action, and religion in the early medieval Middle East. Her research has been published, among other venues, in Harvard Theological Review, Church History and Religious Culture, and Studies in Late Antiquity.

Religion and the military shaped each other in the medieval Middle East. Soldiers built churches and mosques. Monks marched in battles. Icons of soldiers were raised in temples. Sermons of holy war catalyzed recruitment and combat. Soldiers’ hagiographies shaped communal identities. Military language taught believers to interpret their bodies and their lives. Despite this entwined relationship, military history and the history of religion in the early medieval Middle East have mostly been in each other’s blind spot. We tend to narrate the story of religion centering the oft-cited triad of clerics, monastics/ascetics, and laypeople. In this talk, I explore the ways we may revisit the reconstructions of Christianity in the first two hundred years of Islamic rule in the Middle East through the lens of the multifarious relationships between military and religious actors in the Jazīra. Sharing examples from Greek, Arabic, and Syriac literature and epigraphy, I will show the ways soldiers and other armed men influenced religious practice and space, shaped religious concepts like asceticism, and destabilized the authority of the Church. Centering the story of religion around the multidirectional relationships between soldiers and civilians nuances our understanding of religion, while illuminating the cross-confessional commonalities and contention between religious communities.