The project asks, in general, how Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa depicts these networks, as well as, more specifically, which people, places, and types of communication were involved in them. This project demo will explain the different stages of this analysis. First, we identify and “tag” people and places in the source text. Next, we use these tags to create prosopographical nuggets called “factoids,” which encapsulate many different assertions throughout the text about the people involved and form the basis for mapping their relationships as a network. Finally, we analyze these networks, using quantitative metrics to focus our attention on the persons, places, or features in the network that call for in-depth qualitative study. We anticipate—and our preliminary results suggest—that this process will bring to light specific but underappreciated aspects of interreligious exchange.

The “Communities of Knowledge” project is funded by the “Kleine Fächer – Große Potentiale” program of the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, 2018–2021.

The suspicion of unbelief –and the shadow of the Dahriyya– never abandoned physicians, but the critique against medicine eventually become a critique of dhimmīs. Medicine had been almost monopolised by Sabians and Christians under the early Abbasids and the Ayyubids, and was largely practiced by Jews in the Fatimid and Mamluk periods. From the 12th/13th century onwards, however, we witness an increasing concern about the confession of physicians that led to the islamisation of this field with the promotion of Muslim medical practitioners and the emergence of the so-called prophetic medicine (ṭibb nabawī).

Regretfully, Ibn Abī Uṣaybʿia is almost completely silent about all these questions. This ‘Islamisation of medicine’ is perceivable in the increase of Muslim physicians and the references to conversions that appear in the 13th c. biographies of the ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ, but the physician portrayed by this author is a rather idealised image, untainted by these petty polemics.

In this paper I will survey a number of sources that offer a rather different glimpse of the role of medicine and dhimmī physicians in pre-Modern Islam. I shall be looking at the way theologians attacked medicine and how it was defended by both Muslim and non-Muslim physicians, sometimes with very similar arguments. I will argue that these polemics cannot be simply subsumed into the dichotomy Islamic/non-Islamic sciences, nor reduced to a clash between Muslim and non-Muslims.

These references span authors, genres, and centuries of Arabic literature, appearing in histories, geographies, adab works, heresiographies, ṭabaqāt literature, and more. These texts cite the Zoroastrian priests of the ʿAbbāsid era (al-mawbaḏ in Arabic) as authors of books, informants on topics of Persian religious or cultural significance, sages attributed with wise or clever sayings, advisors to kings and caliphs, and participants in religious debates in the court of the caliphs. When we look outside the extant corpus of Zoroastrian texts, we find that there were mobeds active in the wider intellectual circles and operating under the patronage of Muslim rulers, and there were multiple communities of Zoroastrians living under Islamic rule; and it is not clear to what extent they communicated with each other or followed similar practices. This paper will pay particular attention to references in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist, al-Bīrūnī’s al-Āṯār al-bāqiya, and an unpublished letter of Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābīʾ, which all point to a late tenth-century floruit of a particular line of Zorostrian priests. Rather than assuming a narrative of orthodox transmission, these and other Arabic sources from the period can shed light on where and when Zoroastrian communities thrived, what groups and individuals were considered authoritative, and how they negotiated that authority under new Islamic regimes.

Much of this diffusion was carried out by Roman trading vessels moving down the Red Sea from Alexandria to cross the Indian Ocean to trade precious metals for Indian spices. In turn Indian trading vessels made the voyage to Alexandria. After the fall of Egypt in 31 AD to the Roman Empire of Augustus, this trade was accelerated, including over 120 large vessels a year sailing down the Red Sea for Indian and Sri Lankan ports. In this paper, we will note several key features of this trade. First, this enormously large spice trade supported Roman military activity for centuries by means of a value tax at the borders of 25%. Control of Egypt was crucial to this tax. Second, movement of the trade fleets from the Red Sea and returning was based on a careful understanding of seasonal monsoon activity for propulsion. This predictable wind propulsion allowed 6 knots per hour or better. Third, borrowing of numerical systems by Arabic traders while working in India was common but not systematic, as India hosted a multitude of different numerical systems using a different number of digits. Limiting the number of digits to ten as the Indo-Arabic system diffused across the Mediterranean Sea was the last major innovation of the spread of this system and its three variant glyphs.

References

MOLGAARD, C.A. (2018). Factors in the Diffusion of Islamic Mathematics in the Mediterranean. Proceedings of the Second International Statistics Conference in Croatia, Opatija, May, 2018. New Advances in Statistical Methods: Applications for a Better World, Volume 2, No. 1, Pp. 43-48.

MOLGAARD, C.A. and Foss, T. (2016). Economic and Literacy Factors in the Diffusion of Zero and the Hindu-Arabic Numeral System in the Mediterranean and Adriatic Culture Areas. Proceedings of the First International Statistical Conference in Croatia, May 5-6, 2016, Zagreb, Croatia. Pp. 228-233.

The textual examination of the Arabic text will be conducted along with the paleographical and codicological analysis of the fragment, in order to suggest some hypotheses about its dating and provenance. Such a multidisciplinary research represents a starting point from which some thoughts, referred to the Arabic scriptio superior in the first place, has been carried out. For example, the study of the Arabic text − which testifies a high degree of knowledge in the fields of botany and medicine − along with the palimpsest order of the fragment, has suggested a monastic environment as its probable place of origin. Furthermore, the fragment represents a documentary witness which highlights the relevance of the body care, as attributed in such environment, in addition to the peculiar process of the discard of a religious text − the Bible in Greek − apparently sensed as no more useful, in a context arguably yet arabized. More interestingly, it is a clear evidence of the fact that such a vision of life was pursued acquiring ideas and concepts, also derived from different cultures − even if it would have implied the study and the use of an Islamic text, written in the Arabic script.

In my presentation, I will briefly summarise the research history to illustrate how historiography is prone to be (mis-)guided by cultural predispositions and shaped by issues, concerns, and blind spots rooted in the historian’s realm of experience.

The commentary by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Ṭaybughā was the result of a longstanding friendship with Rabbi David ben Yehoshuʿa, the grandson of Maimonides’ great-grandson. The impact of this friendship comes to the fore on several occasions in David’s own commentary on the Mishneh Torah. In David’s view, this friendship represented far more than a mere social acquaintance with a Muslim soulmate. Like his illustrious ancestor, he conceived of the Foundational Laws of the Torah as a straightforward, ‘exoteric’ digest of all theoretical sciences, in such a way that a well-conceived commentary upon these chapters should build upon the most advanced scientific knowledge available at a given time. The perfect commentator should therefore be a leading scientist of his time, irrespective of his religious affiliation.

The paper will, firstly, address the question which groups of animals are considered as being able to dream according to Aristotle, Avicenna, Barhebraeus, Albert the Great in the Latin West, who was also in particular influenced by Avicenna, as well as the Iraqi zoologist Ibn Abī al-Ashʿath, who stood more in the Galenic than Aristotelian tradition, and point to changes and ask whether these changes were intentional or just due to paraphrasing a given source.

Secondly, the paper will address the question which sources Barhebraeus had at his disposal and where. Though witnessing the very end of the Abbasid era, he still benefitted from translations begun during the early Abbasids. Especially the early combined Arabic transmission of three Aristotelian zoological works still had an impact on his Syriac Book on Animals.

Thirdly, the question of collaborating with other scholars shall be addressed, though this has to be done ex negativo for the composition of the Animals. While Barhebraeus is assumed to have met, for example, the Muslim scholar Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī in person at the Maragha observatory and academy, which had an influence on his astronomical works, and also a personal acquaintance with Ibn Kammūna, a philosopher of Jewish descent, has recently been assumed by Roggema regarding theological texts, this form of cooperation surprisingly doesn’t seem to be the case for his biological works, where he primarily relies on Aristotle and Avicenna. The paper will look into the reasons for that and argue tentatively that this assumed lack of a manifestation of a knowledge transfer by personal exchange in his biological works, in contrast to other works by him, might here be due to a neglect of zoological topics or a changed curriculum in post-classical Islamic philosophy, and that this lack of contemporary or at least post-Avicennan available texts led him to take recourse to Aristotle and Avicenna instead.

Really some points of al-Ḥallāj’s teaching about divine love, annihilation of the human spirit in God and incarnation (ḥulūl) of the divine nature (lāhūt) in the human nature (nāsūt), and unity with God (ittiḥād) have clear parallels with Syrian Christianity. His cosmological doctrine has a number of parallels with ideas of pseudo-Empedocles that gained popularity in Syrian monasteries. The crucial points of al-Ḥallāj’s cosmology were promoted by Abū ’l-Ḥasan ʻAlī al-Daylamī in the Kitāb ʿaṭf al-alif al-maʾlūf ʿalā l-lām al-maʿṭūf. Al-Daylamī was a disciple of Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and belonged to the tradition that cultivated the cosmological ideas of pseudo-Empedocles. In the ʿAbbasid epoch this tradition comes from Dayr Qunnā. The Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics written by Mattā b. Yūnus, the eminent representative of the local scientific tradition shows this tendency. We can reconstruct the crucial points of the Arab partisans of pseudo-Empedocles according to several texts of al-Shahrastānī, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, al-Daylamī and al-Ḥallāj. For example, the presence of five emanations and four elements which are moved by love and hostility, and passionate love as the most important divine attribute. The materia prima appeared through this attribute.

To get a better insight into ​once well known scientific Arabic literature​, this article seeks to trace networks evolving around works which were ​produced and circulated between the 8th and 13th century and are ​presumed to be lost today​.

As a starting point, this study will be based on an analysis of the works mentioned in ​Ibn Abī Usaibiʿa​’s ​History of Physicians​. I wish to draw attention to the quantity of missing works still read, or at least heard of by ​Ibn Abī Usaibiʿa​. I examine ​general trends of what kind of books got lost and (if feasible) through what processes. ​Thereby it may be possible to observe certain regional, cultural, temporal or religious trends, and determine what the percentage of lost medical literature from a certain region is.

The second part of this article will ​focus on the afterlife of astronomical and astrological works lost after the 13th c. An analysis of networks evolving around the lost works will be backed up with further resources and literature. I wish to understand who were the authors and owners of books on the astral sciences now lost? Were these books according to ​Ibn Abī Usaibiʿa​’s insights shared, studied and discussed within various communities or were they held in so-called “small world communities”?

Our intent is to approach the Fihrist as a coherent totality, taking into account the overarching structure of the text and the repeating patterns from one section to another, and to assess its treatment of interreligious scholarly collaboration through a systematic survey of the relevant instances. Since Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 330/990) gathered pieces of information about a wide range of scholars, it is very interesting to examine the ways in which he depicts the cases of interaction – and sometimes conflict – between Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. It is particularly important when it comes to specialists of rational sciences, as it is well-known that certain fields such as medicine, astronomy and philosophy involved scholars from different religious backgrounds in Abbasid and Buyid centres of knowledge, especially in the context of translation activities.

Three main lines of inquiry will guide our presentation. First, the forms, times and places of interreligious exchanges in the Fihrist. Then, the position of the author regarding this phenomenon: does he explicitly acknowledge it or does he merely mention it without labelling it? Lastly, since these collaborations mainly appear in the context of anecdotes, how can we interpret these narratives, and use them to improve our understanding of the social and religious dynamics of the Abbasid scholarly milieu? Our hope is that by focusing on the general structure of this work, we will shed a new light on the problematic of interreligious collaboration in the Abbasid society, as well as lay the ground for drawing parallels with Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ in that respect.

The manuscripts transmitting Johannes' treatise provide interesting insights into this process.

Obviously, the first two ways must be taken into consideration for approaching properly how the sources spread into the Arabic world and how they were handled by scholars, many of them were travellers and collectors of books. Nevertheless, the latter, to which one must add discussions between trained physicians, gives us a lively and vivid insight into the way Arabic medicine evolved through debates between prominent figures.

In this respect, in connection with the transmission of medical art and the handbooks, of great interest are the issues related to the religious affiliation of the physicians, either Christians, Jews or Muslims, at the turning point between the Ayyūbid and the Mamlūk eras (in the XIII^th century AD) between Damascus and Cairo, for they all did refer to Greek sources, but in different ways. On this account, of particular interest are the literary patterns that are used to put on stage these controversies as they may rely on traditions already found centuries ago, in authors such as al-Jāḥiẓ or al-Tawḥīdī.

We will try to explore the most significant examples provided by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah, some of which deal with teaching, others with research, showing active discussions between physicians, regardless of religion, facilitated by the sultan himself who provided a special place at his residence to be used as a majlis for research. Surely, depending on whether they were Muslims, Jews or Christians, the social positions they held were different, but also complementary as they had different access to the sources. Even the most prominent Muslim physicians had to rely on colleagues who could recall Galenic sources word for word. This point explains to a large extent the faithfulness of the text preserved in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah to the Greek sources.

These letters document an intense theological debate that took place between Christians and Muslims at the court, one that used Aristotelian logic as a sort of shared language in order to discuss urgent religious and philosophical matters. While scholars have paid much attention to this material, there remains to be studied how Timothy modulated his explanations according to the intended audience. My paper aims to analyse how Timothy managed to express his beliefs in different ways depending on different occasions. Far from being a faithful reflection of the dialogues that took place at the caliph’s court, I maintain that Timothy’s letters are carefully planned literary products that served a double purpose. On the one hand, they conveyed a climate of peaceful and productive exchange with Muslim scholars and sovereigns, but on the other, they played the crucial role of providing other Christians with a ready-made set of answers to some of the thorniest questions and objections that their Muslim counterparts could pose to them. By extending the view to those letters (esp. 34-6) that were aimed solely at an internal, Christian audience, I will show how this process of reader-oriented variation occurred and I will attempt to reconstruct Timothy’s preoccupations as Head of the eastern Church.

Bibliography

Berti, Vittorio, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, Patriarca cristiano di Baghdad. Ricerche sull’epistolario e sulle fonti contigue. Cahiers de Studia Iranica 41, Chrétiens en terre d’Iran 3. Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2009.

Griffith, Sidney Harrison, “Disputes with Muslims in Syriac Christian Texts: From Patriarch John (d. 648) to Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286)”, Pages 251-273 in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter. Edited by Lewis, B. and Niewöhner, F.. Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 4. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992.

id., “From Patriarch Timothy I to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq: Philosophy and Christian Apology in Abbasid Times; Reason, Ethics and Public Policy”, Pages 75-98 in Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages. Edited by Tamcke, Martin. Beiruter Texte und Studien 117. Beirut: Orient-Institut / Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007.

id., “The Syriac Letters of Patriarch Timothy I and the Birth of Christian Kalām in the Mu‘tazilite Milieu of Baghdad and Basrah in Early Islamic Times”, Pages 103-132 in Syriac Polemics: Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink. Edited by van Bekkum, Wout Jac. and Drijvers, Jan Willem and Klugkist, Alex C.. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 170. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.

id., “Patriarch Timothy I and an Aristotelian at the Caliph’s Court”, Pages 38-53 in The Christian Heritage of Iraq: Collected Papers from the Christianity of Iraq I-V Seminar Days. Edited by Hunter, Erica C.D.. Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 13. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009.

Heimgartner, Martin, “Die Disputatio des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos (780‒823) mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdi”, Pages 41-56 in Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages. Edited by Tamcke, Martin. Beiruter Texte und Studien 117. Beirut: Orient-Institut / Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007.

id., “Trinitätslehre beim ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos (780‒823) in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Islam”, Pages 69-80 in Christliche Gotteslehre im Orient seit dem Aufkommen des Islams bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Tamcke, Martin. Beiruter Texte und Studien 126. Beirut / Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2008.

id., ed. Timotheos I., Ostsyrischer Patriarch. Disputation mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdī. CSCO 631-632, Syr. 244-245. Louvain: Peeters, 2011.

id., “Der ostsyrische Patriarch Timotheos I. (780–823) und der Aristotelismus: Die aristotelische Logik und Dialektik als Verständigungsbasis zwischen den Religionen”, Pages 11-22 in Orientalische Christen und Europa: Kulturbegegnung zwischen Interferenz, Partizipation und Antizipation. Edited by Tamcke, Martin. Göttinger Orientforschungen, I. Reihe: Syriaca 41. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012.

Hurst, Thomas Richard, “The Syriac Letters of Timothy I (727–823): A Study in Christian-Muslim Controversy”. Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1986.

Suermann, Harald, “Der nestorianische Patriarch Timotheos I. und seine theologischen Briefe im Kontext des Islam”, Pages 217-230 in Zu Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Gegenwartslage der syrischen Kirchen. Ausgewählte Vorträge des deutschen Syrologen-Symposiums vom 2.-4. Oktober 1998 in Hermannsburg. Edited by Tamcke, Martin and Heinz, Andreas. Studien zur orientalischen Kirchengeschichte 9. Münster / Hamburg / London: LIT, 2000.

Watt, John W., “Greek Philosophy and Syriac Culture in ‘Abbasid Iraq”, Pages 10-37 in The Christian Heritage of Iraq: Collected Papers from the Christianity of Iraq I-V Seminar Days. Edited by Hunter, Erica C.D.. Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 13. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009. = Watt, John W., The Aristotelian Tradition in Syriac, ch. 12. London: Routledge, 2019.

id., “The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers”, Pages 7-43 in Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond: Philosophical and Theological Exchanges between Christians and Muslims in the Third/Ninth and Fourth/Tenth Centuries. Edited by Janos, Damien. Islamic History and Civilization 124. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2015.

Although the textual material of the Muʿtazilite thinkers from the 8th and 9th centuries which has come down to us is rather scanty, it is possible to identify references to certain Muʿtazilite thinkers or to particular Muslim doctrines in the texts written by Timothy and Nonnus. The paper outlines these references to contemporary Muslim thought in more detail than previous research has done. Thus, it demonstrates that Christians and Muslims were not just religious counterparts during the ʿAbbāsid period. Instead, even religious disputation texts show that its Christian authors had an intimate knowledge of the Muslim theology of their period and must have been in close contact with their Muslim colleagues.

Selected bibliography:

Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam, Princeton 2008.

Martin Heimgartner, Die Briefe 40 und 41 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I. (CSCO 673 / 674), Louvain 2019.

Martin Heimgartner, Timotheos, ostsyrischer Patriarch: Disputation mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdī (CSCO 631 / 632), Louvain 2011.

Joachim Jakob, Syrisches Christentum und früher Islam. Theologische Reaktionen in syrisch-sprachigen Texten vom 7. bis 9. Jahrhundert (Innsbrucker theologische Studien 95), Innsbruck 2020 (to be published in October 2020).

Michael Philip Penn, Envisioning Islam. Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World, Philadelphia 2015.

Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra. Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols., Berlin 1991–1997.

Albert Van Roey, Nonnus de Nisibe: Traité apologétique (Bibliothèque du Muséon 21), Louvain 1948.

"Embedding Conquest" investigates the mechanics and structures of social, economic and personal dependency that tied the diverse regions of the early Islamic empire together, from the Nile Delta to the Hindu Kush. We approach this broad question as a team by examining a vast corpus of documentary letters written on papyrus, paper, potsherds, and other materials, as well as letters reproduced in literary sources. In our demo, we will present some of our most salient preliminary findings. We will focus on the elements of our research that best highlight the coparticipation of religious leaders and religious agents from different groups, environments, and communities.

The project studies the mechanics of Islamic rule through three main areas: the language of social dependency expressed, in particular, in letters of request; the relationship between central and provincial governorship; and the role of local elites as well as actors at the fringes of government, such as religious scholars, among others. Our research is comparative, as it embraces local realities in different regions and looks at a variety of groups, not to mention sources in several languages and scripts; attentive to trends and trajectories, as it covers over three centuries; and innovative, as it is based on most recent findings in papyrology and archaeology, combining them with new perspectives in Middle East history. For the virtual forum on "Jews, Christians, and Muslims as Colleagues and Collaborators in the Abbasid Near East" we would like to briefly present the research of two team members in particular, the project's postdoctoral fellows Ed Hayes and Cecilia Palombo, who have been working on the intersection of religious leadership and political governance. Ed Hayes' research focuses on the history of early Imami Shi'i communities and on the relationship between fiscal policy and religious protest. Cecilia Palombo's research, on the other hand, looks at the development of localized forms of Islamic governance through the involvement of Christian religious leaders, such as monastic headmen.

We hope to take the opportunity of this Forum for sharing some of our insights concerning the role of religious leaders from different communities in shaping and establishing early Islamic rule; and concerning the way in which those leaders' political activities, at the same time, contributed to shape religious knowledge and experience.

In this paper, I argue that, when used in Syriac Christian legal texts, the term ḥanpā should be viewed as a legal category, one that very much included Muslims. In this context, a ḥanpā is essentially an outsider who may still interact with Syriac Christian individuals and communities, but in an increasingly regulated way that is meant to protect Syriac Christian communities from loss of constituents (presumably to conversion to Islam) or the blurring of boundaries between Muslim and Christian beliefs and practices. For example, marrying one’s daughter to a pagan was condemned in the canons of George I of Antioch (d. 790 C.E.), and marrying a daughter to a ḥanpā barred father and daughter from entering the church. It is clear this ruling included Muslim men, or perhaps was specifically meant for them. In contrast, earlier Syriac Christian leaders such as Jacob of Edessa (d. 708 C.E.) allowed Christian women who married Muslim men to continue taking communion, on grounds that not allowing them to do so would encourage conversion to Islam. Use of ḥanpā to describe Muslims in the early ʿAbbasid era suggests an attempt to regulate interactions with Muslims, with a particular emphasis on marriage, conversion, and social interactions.

Nevertheless, incorporating “religious affiliation” as a factor in analyzing Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s text is fraught with complexity. First is the looming issue of what religion even means in this context. Second is the question of which terms or phrases the author uses to intentionally signal a particular affiliation. Third, which other characteristics may be taken to indicate religious affiliation, as perhaps certain titles, professions, actions, or (very cautiously) names? Finally, what should be done with mixed indications, whether these are due to inaccurate sources, ambiguous affiliation, or conversion?

I will present a case for recording these textual indications using the prosopographical tool of “factoids,” which can support a more nuanced analysis than simply recording a single affiliation for each person. Each factoid, representing an assertion by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa or his sources, is one of several markers of religious affiliation, which may point toward different affiliations for the same person. The strength of these markers and their agreement or variance for a particular person provide specific data points that can be used to reconstruct networks of communities while also allowing for alternate scenarios.

The “Communities of Knowledge” project is funded by the “Kleine Fächer – Große Potentiale” program of the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, 2018–2021.

A new digital research project (HIMME: Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East) is developing a reference tool to demonstrate the shared culture and society of the diverse medieval Middle East. It will provide a union index to selected primary sources in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, indexing the people, places, and practices mentioned in each literary tradition. The result is that someone interested in, for example, the famous counter-Crusader (and sultan loyal to the Abbasid caliphate) Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn can search a database and discover relevant primary sources in unexpected Hebrew and Syriac as well as expected Arabic and Latin sources, while the later conqueror Timur Lenk is also mentioned in Greek and Armenian texts that might easily be missed. This presentation will offer a preview of the project (to be published officially on August 1, 2021), a discussion of its scope, and an exploration of its implications for the culture of knowledge shared among Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the medieval Middle East.

This project has been made possible in part by the (USA’s) National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this presentation do not necessarily represent those of the (USA’s) National Endowment for the Humanities or of Oklahoma State University.