In this volume, Jack Tannous provides a remarkable synthesis of the literary evidence concerning the transition from late antiquity to the medieval era in the Near East, showing a mastery of the relevant materials that is heretofore unequalled. The study focuses largely on Christian sources—which is in line with one of its primary aims—and even more specifically on sources from the Miaphysite communities of Syro-Palestine and Iraq. Tannous identifies two main goals for his book: “First, to argue against adopting a heavily theological understanding of the Christian communities in the post-Chalcedonian Middle East as well as against a strongly doctrinally focused understanding of Christian-Muslim interactions. And second, to decenter Islam within medieval Middle Eastern history and de-sectarianize the subject by undermining the common understanding that the history of the medieval Middle East is synonymous with the problems and questions of Islamic history” (7). In my estimation, the book is much more successful in achieving its second aim than its first.

Tannous sets the stage with discussions of literacy and the distinction between the learned and the “simple” in late ancient Christianity (chapters 1 and 2). Here he lays the groundwork for the argument that follows in chapters 3–7: that simple Christians, who constituted the vast majority, had little interest or understanding of the theological controversies regarding the divinity and incarnation of Christ and that confessional allegiances were determined largely by various social conditions. In this, Tannous continues a tradition stretching back at least a century of seeking to understand the theological divisions of late ancient Christianity in light of contemporary social and political conditions (a literature that is largely absent from this volume). While Tannous's arguments to this end are intriguing, I do not find them persuasive. It certainly must have been true that many late ancient Christians lacked a nuanced understanding of these debates. Yet having taught early Christian history to college students—mostly of a Christian background—for more than twenty-five years, this remains largely the case today and presumably always has been. I myself find certain elements of the Christological controversies occasionally baffling. Yet one should not equate a lack of detailed understanding with indifference. Across the ages and up to today, religious believers have regularly held ardent convictions about things that they cannot fully explain or understand. Sophisticated understanding should not be our measure of conviction. Tannous presents a bit of a straw man, I think, when he proposes that previous scholarship has approached these issues as if the late ancient world were “a patristic seminar run amok” (repeated on 112, 226, and 398). I do not think this entirely fair, and while there certainly are scholars of patristics whose theological interests engage these questions at their most intellectually sophisticated level, this is not generally characteristic of the study of late ancient Christianity, which has shown considerably more nuance.

There are also significant methodological issues with Tannous's approach. This study is persistently very trusting of what is reported in the sources, and often it cites much later sources as unique witnesses to events that occurred centuries earlier with no consideration of whether we can simply jump from these medieval reports to realities of late antiquity (e.g., 14 and 34 for two of the earliest examples). Tannous freely acknowledges that his study largely dispenses with such potentially problematic questions, addressing them in a brief appendix at the end of the book. Here he explicitly rejects the hermeneutics of suspicion as developed in biblical and early Christian studies (which includes late ancient Christianity) as well as the profound issues raised regarding the literary nature of our sources since the linguistic turn. Regarding the latter, Tannous avers that such theoretical issues lead toward a “dead end if one wants to write social history” (508). Perhaps this is so, but the desire to write social history alone does not warrant the effective dismissal of thorny issues that these critical perspectives raise concerning the mediated nature of our knowledge of the past. Moreover, given that this study aims to conjure forth the simple believers of the early medieval world for readers from sources that are often reluctant to reveal them, it would certainly be helpful to identify relevant models from the sociology of religion (rather than occasional ethnographic anecdotes) that could validate the alleged link between religious simplicity and indifference that undergirds much of the study's arguments. Although the book makes an occasional nod to evidence afforded by liturgy and piety, it neglects the tremendous value that knowledge of these topics provides for understanding the religion of the simple. In the case of the Nestorian controversy, for instance, it seems clear that popular devotion to the Theotokos led the simple to fervently oppose Nestorius's Christology, which contradicted their piety. A similar argument can be made, I am convinced, that popular devotion to the suffering of Christ played a role in popular responses the Christological controversies of the sixth and seventh century.

Chapter 8 persuasively argues for a continuation of learning from late antiquity into the early Islamic world, and the remaining chapters, 9–14, combine Christian and Islamic sources to understand the introduction of Islam to the late ancient Near East. The three most successful chapters here are 11 (which makes general observations about conversion) and 13 and 14 (which focus on the prominence of Christianity in the early medieval Near East and the mechanisms by which Christian and Jewish religious culture entered the Islamic tradition, respectively). The account of the rise of Islam in chapters 9 and 10, however, is deeply problematic, in my view, for reasons that I unfortunately do not have the space to engage fully in this context. But, for instance, in chapter 9, Tannous develops a picture of what he maintains was widespread confusion, deviance, and indifference regarding doctrine among the vast majority of Christians on the eve of Islam, drawing from the most extreme reports that he can find in the sources. It amounts, in my opinion, to something resembling a circus side show of late ancient Christianity. Likewise, in chapter 10, Tannous is often far too credulous of the early Islamic sources. For example, he takes at face value the reports of conversions of Muhammad's earliest followers to his new religion, without considering how much these stories have been fashioned to reflect later opinions of these individuals in the Islamic tradition. He also takes at face value reports of the Umayyad leaders engaging in “un-Islamic” behaviors, again without taking into account that the later historical tradition has a sharply anti-Umayyad bias and regularly goes out of its way to make them appear as bad Muslims. These are yet further examples of a frequent failure to engage the sources critically. Chapter 12, which aims to illuminate the conversion of simple Christians to early Islam, is also not convincing for similar reasons identified above regarding the nature of simple belief, among others.

In the end, most of the evidence that Tannous unearths for religious complexity and hybridity on the ground tacks very strongly in favor of the hypothesis regarding the beginning of Islam articulated by Fred Donner in Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Harvard University Press, 2010). It is accordingly surprising that Tannous seeks to separate his findings from Donner's proposal that Muhammad's new religious movement was confessionally complex and included Jews and Christians who remained in their faith yet recognized his prophetic leadership (394–396). Muhammad seemingly required of his earliest followers only belief in God and the impending Last Day, as well as recognition of his leadership. Yet Tannous urges readers to reject the idea that Muhammad's new religious movement “stemmed from a consciously inclusive ideology,” “an explicitly ecumenical ideology,” and “a top-down ideology of religiously motivated tolerance” (394). The insistence here on some sort of deliberate intention greatly misses the point, I think. Muhammad was not, I suspect, consciously and explicitly articulating an ecumenical ideology from the top down. Rather, the confessional complexity of Muhammad's early community was almost certainly an ad hoc mixture of closely related monotheisms in advance of the approaching eschaton rather than a matter of deeply held theological principles.

There is much more that I would like to say, but I will leave it at this: be sure to read this book. It is certain to stimulate considerable thought and has advanced discussions of religious culture in this era significantly, even if one may disagree with certain parts of the argument.