An early reaction to An Early Christian Reaction to Islam

In the publisher's expo, I saw that Iskandar Bcheiry has this very month released his PhD thesis as An Early Christian Reaction to Islam. You can read his overview of his predecessors likewise at the ATLA blog.

That he released it via Gorgias is annoying because they jack their prices... a lot. Gorgias has also taken it upon itself to re-release Hoyland's classic Seeing Islam which, unfortunately, is looking more and more dated in its 1998 form, thanks to fine studies like Bcheiry's.

Bcheiry - rather, his greedy and lazy editors at Gorgias - let through a few solecisms like "Heracles" for that Napoleonic self-appointed "consul", turned emperor, Heraclius the Younger (pp. 49, 117). Bcheiry himself knows better (p. 2 &c, and the index). The dḥlaw [d]alaha occurrences in p. 111 need their diacritical dots, especially given the dot under Ḥidyâb p. 73. I also noted some infelicitous redundancies in the prose here and there. Slips of the pen happen and that is why we have editors. If Bcheiry wishes I can introduce him to a fine editor over at Pickmans Press.

What a reader would have appreciated most would have been an epistle index. Bcheiry reproduces much of the original East Syriac in what looks like Serté (I claim no great knowledge of the many Aramaic scripts save perhaps the "Hebrew"). [UPDATE 2/1/22: Yeah, even in 2019 I'd smelled a rat. Mingana and Furman, using Oriental scripts, wore it better.] Bcheiry also lists Ishūʿyahb's mid-period letters, AD 637-50, explicitly at the start of ch. 3 over pp. 79-80; and some letters as Catholicos to his breakaway Farsi Metropolitan 650-2, pp. 75-6. If he so organises the man's output as Catholicos after 652, I don't see them here.

INTERJECT 2/6/22: Bcheiry's sequence of the late-630 CE letters is plausible but impressionistic and unargued.

Since Bcheiry scrunches the sequence of letters after AD 650 all to 650-2, the reader has no handle on what events might fall within 'Uthman's last (controversial) years nor on the Furqa following it AD 657 on. Bcheiry's last words pp. 151-66 concern the "impostor" of epistle 14C, implying that's Ishūʿyahb's last word as well (although another part of 14C appears p. 132, and he assigns 14C to 650 in p. 75). This correlates the "impostor" to Satan (no less). Bcheiry has not read my "Heretic of Rewardashir" which I first posted December 2010, currently in The Arabs and Their Qur'an, pp. 3-8. This argues that the heretic is al-Khirrît of the Banû Nâjiya, placing those events to AD 659ish.

But here let's not talk as a competitor; let's talk as an editor. The bulk of pp. 151-66 handles that letter 14C's affinities with contemporary Nestorian Syriac literature. The impression given - in this book's present structure - is that 14C is the capstone of the overall book's argument. But the overall text in this book, certainly the book's best text, present a temporal summary of these letters. In that context pp. 151-66 is many more pages than one should expect from an inline discussion of a not-very-long pericope of a single letter; it is also misplaced given Bcheiry's own 650 AD date. Inasmuch as 14C switches to outside parallels, it breaks the flow of the thesis as a whole.

I can imagine Ovidiu Ioan arguing the same for this book's take on "7C" pp. 106-16, that this is a digression.

I suggest to Gorgias, then, that this book get a thorough Second Edition. The edition would include that index of epistles. It would assign the bulk of at least pp. 151-66 to an appendix.