The Role of Super Natural Powers in Arab-Byzantine Warfare as Reflected by Popular Imagination | ||||
| Journal of Medieval and Islamic History | ||||
| Article 13, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2015, Page 3-38 PDF (398.84 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jmih.2015.150208 | ||||
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| Author | ||||
| Abdel-Aziz Muhammad Ramadan | ||||
| History Dept., Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, Egypt. | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| To modern mentality, supernatural powers and their intervention in matters of daily life seem like a sort of superstition, but for the ancient and medieval peoples, they were frequently considered the only available interpretation of what was occurring around them, and always the last resort at the time of danger or need. It is very difficult, as Peter Burke has pointed out, to find a distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ in the Middle Ages. Among medieval peoples, Byzantines and Arabs can present very clear examples of believing in the 'supernatural'. According to Cyril Mango, the ‘average Byzantine’ inhabited a world dominated by superstition, in a society whose culture appears deficient to a modern observer, and "to the Byzantine man, as indeed to all men of the middle ages, the supernatural existed in a very real and familiar sense." In his book The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria, Josef Meri presents the medieval Muslim mind in a very similar way. He also demonstrates common features of believing in the ‘holy’ and his supernaturalism among Jews, Christians, and Muslims of Medieval Syria, interpreting this by saying: "Encountering manifestations of the holy in the pre-modern context occurred within the framework of religion which admitted the ‘supernatural’". | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| The Super Natural Powers; The Arab-Byzantine Warfare; Byzantium vs Arabs | ||||
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