CMES-Medieval Studies Lecture on Medieval Middle Eastern Studies

Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania), Agents of Peace, Ministers of the Holy: Soldiers as Ritual Experts in the Early Medieval Middle East. Co-sponsored by the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

How do soldiers’ religious practices complicate our understanding of spiritual authority and religious community in the medieval Middle East? Officers, soldiers, warlords, and other armed men prayed and preached at temples, marched to the battlefield with relics, interpreted scriptures, and conducted religious ritual in times of war and peace. These acts are studied as manifestations of what some refer to as “army religion” or “wartime religion.” Such practices, however, had broad ramifications on society for the armed and the civilian. This talk reconstructs soldiers as ritual experts in light of Arabic, Greek, and Syriac literature. The ways that soldiers cultivated, exercised, and negotiated such expertise complicate our understanding of "religious diversity" in the medieval Middle East, conventionally defined along the axioms of confessional boundaries articulated by religious institutions.