Agents of Peace, Ministers of the Holy: Soldiers as Ritual Experts in the Early Medieval Middle East

The Standing Committee on Medieval Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents their annual Lecture on the Medieval Middle East with

Reyhan Durmaz 
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania; Fellow in Byzantine Studies AY 2025–26, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Abstract: How do soldiers’ religious practices complicate our understanding of spiritual authority and religious community in the medieval Middle East? Officers, soldiers, warlords, and other armed men prayed and preached at temples, marched to the battlefield with relics, interpreted scriptures, and conducted religious ritual in times of war and peace. These acts are studied as manifestations of what some refer to as “army religion” or “wartime religion.” Such practices, however, had broad ramifications on society for the armed and the civilian. In my talk, in light of Arabic, Greek, and Syriac literature, I will reconstruct soldiers as ritual experts. The ways soldiers cultivated, exercised, and negotiated such expertise, I will demonstrate, complicates our understanding of religious diversity in the medieval Middle East, which is conventionally defined along the axioms of confessional boundaries articulated by religious institutions.

Reyhan Durmaz is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Byzantine Studies Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection, Washington, D.C. (2025–26). Her research interests include Syriac Christianity, religion in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Middle East, and broader theoretical questions about community formation and material religion. Her first book, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022), examines the transmissions of saints’ stories and cults from Christianity to Islam. It was shortlisted for American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Award and for the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Historical Studies). Her research has also been published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Studies in Late Antiquity, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, among other venues.