The Muslim Veneration of Christian Saints: Arabic Accounts of the Excellence of Christians

As anyone will know who has so much has flicked through the pages of the Quran, the Islamic scripture contain many discussions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Yet Muslim tradition also venerates many Christian saints. The model was set by the Quran itself, in the chapter al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), which alludes to the Christian story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as a moral lesson for Muslims. Over the following centuries, Muslim authors recounted the lives of various other Christian saints, ranging from such famous figures as the hermit St Anthony and the martyr St George to the less familiar likes of John of Edessa and Paul of Qentos. Writing in Arabic, Muslim authors highlighted the ‘excellent qualities,’ or fada’il, of these Christians who had such steadfast faith in God. Underlying this collective veneration was a shared scriptural universe, in which the Quran referred to stories from the Bible, and a shared sacred landscape, in which Muslims venerated the shrines of Biblical prophets and Christian saints. Nile Green talks to Reyhan Durmaz, author of Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022).