The basic argument of this book, written with both scholarly and personal zeal, is “to bring this great church father back home” (p. viii), that is, to Syria, the church father's as well as the author's own homeland. In particular, Awad aims to contextualize John of Damascus's writings not primarily in the framework of Byzantine theology, but rather in the social and intellectual environment of “Umayyad Christianity”, i.e. the Arab Christians living under Umayyad rule in Damascus (661–750 ce). A key formula used over and over again by Awad is Sitz im Leben, a phrase coined by the German theologian Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), who heavily stressed the impact of historical, especially social, circumstances on the production of (religious) texts. This is what Awad calls a “from-context-to-text” method (p. 31). Obviously, considering sociocultural elements as an important factor in text production is beyond question; however, this is not entirely new, nor does it imply an innovative access to texts. Awad, therefore, seems to preach to the converted, so to speak. He is possibly right to point out that the Umayyad context has been underestimated sometimes in the interpretation of John's writings, but that does not exclude a Byzantine context. Rather, a text is always situated in more than one context, and scholars are (or at least should be) used to take all relevant contexts (history, popular culture, philosophy/theology, literature, arts, sciences, etc.) into account. In other words: the Sitz im Leben is of course an important, but not the only, criterion to understand a text.

After introducing the case in chapter 1 of his lengthy book, Awad explains his context-centred methodology in chapter 2, before applying it to John of Damascus in chapters 3 and 4, which cannot be discussed here in detail. Awad, to give some hints, especially focuses on John's Arabic name, his “Umayyad identity” as a citizen of Damascus, and the level of his conformity to Islamic society (“John's image as a turban wearer”, pp. 94 ff. – see also the images on pp. 147–152, which are, unfortunately, of poor quality). The core of the book is chapter 5 (over 200 pages long) dealing with John's writings related to Islam, i.e. the famous chapter 100/101 of De haeresibus and, to a lesser degree, the three treatises on the veneration of the images. We will concentrate here on the “Heresy of the Ishmaelites”, as Awad (following Daniel Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam (Leiden, 1972)) calls it. According to Awad, this work is not a piece of heresiological literature (a view strongly put forward recently by Peter Schadler, John of Damascus and Islam: Christian Heresiology and the Intellectual Background to Earliest Christian–Muslim Relations (Leiden, 2018)), but a harsh invective against Islam (later added to the collection of heresies). Of course it is, but who would claim that heresiology is not one-sided, biased and polemical? Investigating the “traces of context in chapter 100/101” (pp. 207–313) on more than one hundred pages (based on some five pages of Greek), Awad comes to the conclusion that “this is no objective and precise demonstration of Islamic kalām as such” (p. 314), but that “his [John's] main concern was to decry Islam and to demean its followers in a blunt, even hostile manner” (p. 316). Yes, but who in the world did deny that?

The key question, to get to the heart of the problem, is whether John deliberately distorted or even invented Islamic beliefs for polemical purposes or, rather, only picked up widespread popular traditions to defame Islam. A good example to illustrate that question is the alleged “Surah of the She-Camel” quoted by John as a Quranic text. Did he simply not know the Quran? Did he rely on a different Quran text (as Schadler suggested)? Or did he intentionally mislead the readers by claiming the existence of an “alternative Quran”? Awad discusses that passage at length, but gives no clear answer. He presumes that John collected stories on the camel as an instrument to counterbalance the Muslims’ polemics against Jesus riding a donkey. This is possible, but does not explain why John thought (or claimed) that there was a surah called “The She-Camel of God”. In my view, the most plausible explanation is that John did not care about whether a ridiculous story came from a canonical text (the Quran, in his eyes, was of course not a holy scripture) or from popular lore: in the context he was living in, it was “Islamic” anyway. The same may be held for John's account of the veneration of the Black Stone, which is a polemical answer to the Muslim charge of the Christians’ veneration of the Holy Cross. Awad is right to point out that John did not intend to engage in a theological discussion on the soteriology of crucifixion, but rather addresses the question of idolatry. This becomes clear even from a superficial view: John criticizes the Muslims kissing the Black Stone, because it bears the image of a pagan goddess. What lies behind, however, is the problem of iconology: kissing an icon of Mary, for example, could induce the same charge (Awad does not see this cross-reference, although he discusses iconology in a separate chapter). John is moving in a minefield, and that his arguments are not “objective” or balanced by means of academic disputation, but rather satirical and polemical, goes without saying.

In conclusion, Awad's book leaves quite a mixed impression: surely, it is a useful contribution to the Umayyad context of John of Damascus's writings, which are fairly situated in their sociocultural environment (the Sitz im Leben). In the light of Awad's broad investigations, we are now able better to understand why John focussed rather on popular beliefs than on theological arguments (although these must not be neglected). On the other hand, this is not an entirely new perspective or even a “revolution” of scholarship, as Awad seems to suggest. The author's personal involvement and engagement notwithstanding, he often spills a lot of ink on issues that are not controversial among scholars at all.