Late Antique Hagiography and Early Islamic Historiography

This paper will consider the emergence under the Abbasid Empire of Muslim conquest narratives, hagiography and other literary genres that suggest the influence of late antique Greek Christian hagiographical tropes.  These tropes, as they appear in Muslim historiography and other literatures from earlier centuries, seem themselves to have first emerged as the result of a conversation between members of Muslim and non-Muslim communities concerning prophecy, revelation and the place of the numinous in the lives of Abrahamic "communities of believers." This conversation, in turn, had been conducted on the basis of a shared vocabulary of late antique signs, symbols and narrative forms, including many that had populated Christian hagiographical texts for centuries before the Muslim conquests.