The common thread that draws them together is the “enticing alterity” of the subjugated and domesticated Christian subaltern. It must be read in tandem with another publication that would turn out to be one of his last, his contribution to the 2009 Festschrift for Stephen Humphreys, “‘His Girdle Wrapped about His Waist/It Is as Though It Is Made from My Heart’: The Christian Exotic in Medieval Muslim Imperial Literature.” 3 In that article, Tom explores the role of the objectified and idealized Christian subaltern in Muslim self-fashioning in the early Islamic empire, juxtaposing two very different topoi in Arabic literature of the Abbasid period: the Christian ascetic as forerunner to and analogue for the ideal Muslim, and Christian monasteries as idealized havens of seduction and delight for elite Muslim men. While his monograph examines particular continuities between late Roman and early Arab Muslim cultures, here Tom turns his attention to the relations-real or imagined-between Muslim elites and Christian subalterns in the early Islamic period. The article presented here, which Tom was working on before his death, represents a new direction in his research.
The publication of his article “Sanctified Violence: Monotheist Militancy as the Tie That Bound Christian Rome and Islam” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2009 served to bring his approach to the attention of a broader audience, as well as making the deeper social and political implications of his work, largely unstated in his monograph, more transparent: “if, as some now suggest, the institution of jihad underscores within Islam some penchant for fanaticism or violence undertaken in God’s name, so too is jihad legible as a trace of the penchant for violence individual Christians and whole Christian communities have manifested since long before the birth of Muhammad.” 2 However, despite the attention Peter Brown paid to this phenomenon in his classic The World of Late Antiquity, as well as later treatments such as Garth Fowden’s From Empire to Commonwealth, this subject remained largely unexplored in a way that did justice to both the late Roman and the early Islamic material until Tom took it up.
1 The rise in religious intolerance and intercommunal violence in the late Roman Empire, which eventually evolved into the distinctive conjunction of militant piety and imperial statecraft in early Islam, is one of the most significant overarching currents of the late ancient period. Tom’s book, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam, is an incipient classic just a few years after its publication, its wide impact is already discernible.
The function of boundaries in and between communities-their elaboration and maintenance, as well as their transgression-is another overarching theme in Tom’s work, entirely fitting for a scholar whose concerns and proficiencies straddled and blurred the lines between disciplines and whose work brought different constituencies into contact and conversation. Well before the publication of his monograph, Tom’s seminal articles caught the attention of scholars working on early Christianity, Late Antiquity, early and classical Islam, and, more diffusely, the complex relationships between religion and violence-both literal and discursive-that feature prominently in much of his research and that may be considered the characteristic theme of all of his studies.
Tom’s work intrigued and spoke to scholars in a number of fields. The untimely death of Tom Sizgorich in January 2011 deprived not just one but several intellectual communities of a talented, eloquent, and uniquely insightful voice.
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