Papadogiannakis (Ioannis), Roggema (Barbara), Patterns of Argumentation and Exchange of Ideas in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, London, Routledge, 2024, 224 p. ISBN 9781138043916

Editors

Ioannis Papadogiannakis is Lecturer in Patristics in the Theology and Classics Departments at King’s College London. He director of the major, five-year ERC project on definitions of belief and identity in the ancient Mediterranean through interreligious debate (6th-8thc).

Barbara Roggema is Research Fellow in the ERC project ’Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean’ (Ruhr University Bochum). She is a specialist in the history of Jewish-Christian-Muslim interaction in the early Islamic Middle East.

Presentation

This volume brings together a group of experts on late antique and early Islam who examine a corpus of medieval Greek, Syriac and Arabic texts which reflect exchange of ideas and opinions. The main focus of the volume is on how religious ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean world (6th-8thc. CE) were shaped by the challenges of rival religious groups, and especially what patterns of argumentation were employed when answers were formulated to critical questions from inside and outside the community.
Much-debated questions in the study of early Christian-Muslim and Jewish-Muslim confrontation are to what extent literary debates reflect live interactions and to what extent the texts allow us to trace the transmission of ideas between the various communities. What sort of methods and techniques were employed by late antique authors to defend their religion and attack other ones? How were rhetorical tools developed and adjusted to meet evolving needs of debating with other religious groups? The volume contributes to ongoing discussions about Islam’s origins in late antiquity and the cultural continuities between Eastern Christianity and Islam.