Course Descriptions

ONLINE MECR 5/343 Orthodox Christian Voices in the Umayyad and Abbasside Periods - Credit Hours: 3

Semester normally offered:

Course Description

The course examines the voices of Christian Orthodox theologians in the Middle East of the Umayyad (661-750 CE) and Abbasside (750-1258) periods, a time of growing religious and political Islamic claims. The authors explored in this course were both pious men and eminent scholars who wrote their works facing the destruction of their traditional cultural areas. Their writings influenced Eastern and Western theologies and are still among the current works of the churches that those authors produced.

Course Equivalencies

• Church History
• Medieval History
• Early Christianity

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, the student should be able to:

• gain access to a range of Middle Eastern Christian texts documenting the Arab-Muslim conquest of their lands from the 7th to the 12th centuries;
• evaluate a range of Middle Eastern Christian and Arab historiographies of the Umayyad and Abbasside periods;
• discover religious responses, still unmatched and used today, by Middle Eastern Christian scholars to Muslim leaders from that formative Islamic period;
• investigate the mutual impact in the encounter between the two religions; and
• ascertain competence in evaluating contemporary academic research on the history of the Umayyad and Abbasside periods.

Field Study