Salam Rassi - Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World: Abdisho of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition

This book is a revised version of my 2016 doctoral thesis, defended at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. I should first like to thank Sebastian Brock and Herman Teule for examining the thesis and recommending it for publication. David Taylor, my former doctoral advisor, supported this project from its inception and has always encouraged me to take the path less travelled. John-Paul Ghobrial welcomed me to Oxford as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and has since provided me with a great deal of moral as well as intellectual support. Further thanks are owed to Yuhan D-S Vevaina, Nora Schmid, and Wahid Amin for casting their eyes on various chapters and providing me with invaluable feedback. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments, corrections, and insights, and to the team at Oxford University Press for steering the editorial process from start to finish.

When I first set out on this topic there were relatively few resources available to those wishing to study the later history of Syriac and Christian Arabic literature. In many ways it felt like I was working from the ground up. Fortunately, critical editions of several key works have since appeared thanks to the philological labours of eljko Paa, Gianmaria Gianazza, Bishara Ebied, and Nikolai Seleznyov (). I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) for making several digitized Syriac and Arabic manuscripts freely available online. This book would have been all the more difficult to write were it not for the work of HMML and their partners across the Middle East. They are a credit to both researchers and the wider community, especially at a time when archives are coming under increasing threat.

Conversations with colleagues, friends, and fellow travellers have been especially helpful. For these interactions I am most thankful to Ahab Bdaiwi, Jonathan Brack, Anna Chrysostomides, Bogdan Draghici, Regula Forster, Tobias Graff, Simcha Gross, Nicholas Harris, Anabel Inge, Grigory Kessel, Feras Krimsti, Ryan Lynch, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Sergey Minov, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Samuel Noble, Lucy Parker, Adrian Pirtea, Liana Saif, Hidemi Takahashi, Jack Tannous, Cecilia Tarruell, and Dorthea Weltecke.

Finally, I would like to thank lia Rodrigues for her patience throughout this whole process, and for teaching me to be whole in everything and to put all I am in the smallest things I do.