Cameron, A.

(1991) ‘The Eastern Provinces in the Seventh Century AD; Hellenism and the Emergence
of Islam’ in Said, S. (ed.) ‘Hellismos’: Quelques Jalons pour une Histoire de l’Identité Grecque, Actes du
Colloque de Strasbourg 25-27 Octobre 1989 Leiden 287-313

294

it is important to realsie that islam is not necessarily the most prominent theme in these texts; there
is in fact more writing about the Jews in the seventh century than about the Arabs, and it is only in
the eighth century

295

that serious attention is given to Islam in Christian polemical and apologetic writing...

in practice it sees clear that the umayyad caliphs were content to follow existing byzantine
precedent, taking over existing practices and using Greek-speaking officials in their administration;
this continued even while they adopted an aggressive foreign policy towards byzantium, and not
even the arabising caliphs abd al malik and walid were immune from this influence. [HA R GIBB ARAB
BYZANTINE RELATIONS UMAYYAD 221-233]

297

it is useful to keep the following in mind: 1) Islam took shape within a context of extreme religious
and cultural tension, reflected in contemporary writing; the Greek element in all this was already
important and problematic; 2) Despite the natural Christian apologetic emphasis on atrocitie, Arab
rue did not curb the amount of writing in Greek or prevent the involvement of eastern Christians in
the religious controver

298

sies of the day. no sudden curtain fell with the first conqusts; major culutral change cmae only with
the arabisation policies of abd al malik and walid ii in the late seventh centry onwards...not
surprisingly, the syriac apocalypse of pseudo-methodius, so often cited as indicative of christian
fears of the muslims, dates exactly from the context of abd al malik’s reforms, and refelcts a
situation in whcih the previous equilibrium was broken by christian conversion to islam under
pressure of abd al malik’s policies.

308

the date for widespread change from greek to arabic in the arab ruled provinces is generally
assumed to coincide with the change from umayyad to abbasid rule in the mid eighth
century....though john of damascus seems to have worked in such isolation from the rest of the
byzantine world, it is clear that he still had access to the full repertoire of greek christian literature

309

...the next generation saw his christian apologetic being communicated in arabic, by the christian
arabic writer theodore abu qurrah, bishop of harran from ad 795-812

the late eighth-cnetury life of romanos the neomartyr was written by a monk of the st saba
monastery directly in arabic and translated thence into georgian. yet neither the use of greek nor
contact with cnople disappeared completely: michael syncellus, for instance, had a greek education
sysem in jsalem in the alter eighth century, and theodore the stude wrote letters to palestinian
monastiers in the early ninth. the change from greek to arabic was neither as sudden nor as
complete as the cases of john of damascus and theodore abu qurrah might suggest.