Women Scholars of Orthodox Christianity - Reyhan Durmaz

Stories between Christianity and Islam: A Conversation with Reyhan Durmaz

Tuesday, April 25, 2023
4 p.m.
Online via Zoom

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University is delighted to present the next episode of its webinar series highlighting the scholarly insights and academic careers of female scholars whose research and writing explore some facet of the history, thought, or culture of Orthodox Christianity. The broadcast will be livestreamed and open to all who have pre-registered. The event will include some time for live audience questions. For those who miss the live event, the Center will archive each episode on its website and YouTube channel.

This episode features a conversation with Reyhan Durmaz and Ashley Purpura whose bios can be found below.

In this talk Reyhan Durmaz will reflect on her recently published book and her current research projects. In Stories between Christianity and Islam (UCP 2022), Dr. Durmaz investigates the dynamics underlying the transmissions of saints' stories between Christianity and Islam. By analyzing a broad group of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts from the 4th to the 14th century, she revisits the lively scholarly conversations about orality, authorship, authority, and memory in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Through the lens of saints' stories, their narrators, and their audiences, she argues against literary taxonomies such as "Christian" and "Islamic" texts. She demonstrates that Christian saints' stories facilitated ongoing conversation between Christians and Muslims about the shared divine past, conceptualizations of sanctity, and communal identities. During her time as the Faculty Fellow at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center this year (AY2022–23), she is working on a new monograph that reconstructs the various forms and expressions of Christianities in the medieval Middle Eastern countryside. The history of Christianity in the Middle East is often studied in light of theological developments and in relation to the presumed dominance of Islam. The book highlights that in rural regions, far from the centers of clerical authority and Islamic influence, Christianity manifested in diverse ways, displaying complex dynamics of religious authority, communal belonging, and ritual practice. In the talk Dr. Durmaz will give examples of material culture and literary sources she uses in her project in order to study Middle Eastern Christianities.

Dr. Durmaz is working on two other related projects. In one, she investigates forms of religious skepticism beyond philosophical writings of the elite in the medieval Middle East, with an eye to destabilizing the Eurocentric narratives of secularization and the implied European roots of modernity. For the other, she studies the role Orthodox Christians have played in the making of publics in the U.S. Her analysis of the first Arabic newspaper in North America, Kawkab Amrika, founded by Christians from Lebanon, is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The talk will address these intertwined projects on Middle Eastern Christians at home and in diaspora.

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Ashley Purpura is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, a faculty fellow of the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program, and the director of the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Purdue University. She is the author of God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium (Fordham University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality (Fordham University Press, 2022). Purpura’s current research projects focus on re-thinking assumptions about women, gender, and otherness in light of Orthodox sources, traditions, and theology.

Reyhan Durmaz is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of religion in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Her research interests include the literature and material culture of Syriac Christianity, hagiography and storytelling, Christian-Muslim relations, and communal identities in the medieval Middle East. Her research and teaching also explores the broader questions surrounding the legacies of the medieval Middle East in the making of the modern world and in the various articulations of the East and the West. Her first book, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), examines the ways saints' stories shared by Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages were used to create multifaceted memories of the divine past. She is currently the Faculty Research Fellow at Fordham University's Orthodox Christian Studies Center. Within the frame of this fellowship, she is working on her second book, which concerns the forms and expressions of Christianity in the medieval Middle Eastern countryside. Dr. Durmaz's scholarship and teaching are dedicated to the protection and prosperity of religious minorities in the Middle East today.