Walter D. Ward. The Mirage of the Saracen

In The Mirage of the Saracen: Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity, Walter D. Ward focuses on the growth of monasticism in the Sinai Peninsula during Late Antiquity. The emphasis in Ward’s excellent and well-crafted study is on the relations between the isolated monasteries in the Sinai and the surrounding larger indigenous nomadic population. Contrasting lifestyles produced animosity between the two parties and led to outbreaks of violence and the martyrdom of monks, decades after Christianity had become the legalized religion of the Roman Empire. This impressive study represents a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on Late Antiquity and the impact of the Islamic conquests. Chapter 1 on the “Saracens” is primarily concerned with the representation of the nomads by the Christian outsiders. It is argued that the monks created an image of a nomadic population as “cruel, barbaric, and unrepentantly pagan” (1) in order to demonstrate the superiority of their Christian lifestyle. In contrast, the allegedly savage and illiterate nomads are the silent majority. Ward notes that 3,850 Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions have been recorded, scattered across the mountainous landscape of the Sinai, mostly laconic graffiti, all perhaps prior to the fourth century based on the eight dated inscriptions between a.d. 193 and 268. Although it is assumed that the nomads in the fourth century and later were the descendants of these Nabataeans, the only Nabataean texts cited are a handful with adjacent Christograms, which were probably added by later Christian pilgrims passing through the region (cf. 72). Not cited is perhaps the equally dubious reading of a Nabataean text that mentions “the year in which the A[rabs] destroyed the land,” an impossible restoration as the later editors surmised (Corpus inscriptionum Semiticarum II, no. 964). Nor is there any analysis of the local Nabataean sanctuaries as discussed in Uzi Avner’s “Nabataeans in Southern Sinai” (ARAM 27, no. 1–2 [2015]: 397–429), which summarizes his earlier string of publications of the Israeli surveys of the Sinai in the 1970s and 1980s. Why such prolific “nomadic” literacy ceased in the Sinai after the third century a.d. is never posited.

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