EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 153texts On the virtues of the soul.^121 Evidently he knew Greek; as for his own
books, they were in Syriac or—mainly—Arabic. They show he had absorbed
the new Muslim theological language of kalām (on which more below), and
knew how to use it to justify Christianity under the new dispensation,^122 as
no doubt when he disputed with Muslim scholars before Maʾmūn during the
latter’s visit to Harrān in 829.
Note, too, Theodore’s association with the Edessa- Harrān area athwart
the Fertile Crescent highway from Alexandria to Baghdad. This location not
only reminds us of other luminaries (Bardaisan, Ephrem of Nisibis, Sergius
of Reshʿaina, and two more Nisibenes, Ibn Hawqal and Elias bar Shenaya)
we have encountered on these supposed East- West/North- South peripheries
between Sasanids/caliphs and Rome, but really at the very center of the Eur-
asian Hinge. It also makes Theodore easy to integrate into the schematic Ara-
bic narrative of how ancient learning passed to its Muslim heirs. Theodore
fits well into the milieu of Christian Syrian translators of Greek texts, and as
a bishop was the absolute insider who knew where to get his hands on the
sought- after manuscripts of Aristotle and the other ancients. If he has yet to
find his due place in modern versions of this story, we can put that down to
Islamic scholars’ continuing allerg y to Christian Arabic.
Arabic Aristotelianism
The Fertile Crescent was the most intellectually accessible and stimulating
region for the new religion of Islam and its nascent Arabic culture to claim as
its own. And if the Mountain Arena was the geographical hinge of the world
which concerns us, the seventh and eighth centuries—essentially the
Umayyad and early Abbasid period—were its narrative, political, and intel-
lectual hinge, when the old Greek and Christian tradition entered an ad-
vanced stage of maturation, not least in the minds of Syriac scholars, while
tremendous new forces from Arabia were brought to bear on that synthe-
sis.^123 The durability of city life in early Islamic Syria has preoccupied recent
scholarship, but not the period’s intellectual dynamism. The distance be-
121 P. Vallat, Farabi et l’École d’Alexandrie (Paris 2004) 23 esp. n. 8; Griffith, Church in the shadow
of the Mosque [5:119] 61. J. Lameer, Al- Fārābī and Aristotelian syllogistics (Leiden 1994) 3–4, rejects the
theory that Theodore translated the Prior analytics into Arabic. See further S. K. Samir (tr. J. P. Monferrer
Sala), Abū Qurrah (Cordoba 2005) 97–100, 110–11.
122 See below pp. 186–87; and compare S. T. Keating, Defending the ‘People of Truth’ in the early
Islamic period: The Christian apologies of Abū Rāʾitah (Leiden 2006), on a similarly oriented miaphysite
contemporary of Theodore.
123 On the Umayyads’ neglected contribution to the formation of Muslim identity, see F. M. Don-
ner, “Umayyad efforts at legitimation,” and C. Décobert, “Notule sur le patrimonialisme omeyyade,” in
Borrut and Cobb (eds), Umayyad legacies [4:123] 187–253.