Earlier this month, I met Stephanie Saldana to talk about her recently published memoir, “The Bread of Angels.” Part of my interview with Saldana, who grew up in San Antonio but now lives in Jerusalem, appears in today’s Life & Style section. You can read it here.
Saldana’s memoir is subtitled “A Journey to Love and Faith,” and it is primarily about the personal transformation she experienced during the year she lived in Syria on a Fulbright fellowship — a year that included a month of religious studies at a desert monastery, where she not only reconnected with her Catholic faith but also later fell in love with a French novice monk. Saldana had just earned her master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School when she went to Syria, and part of the reason she was there was to explore the role of Jesus in Islam and maybe write a book on the subject. She studied the Quran in Arabic with a sheikha, a female scholar of the Muslim holy book, and “The Bread of Angels” relates fascinating stories about Jesus and Mary from the Quran.
Austin was one of Saldana’s last stops on a roughly month-long book tour and she said readers she met on her tour were deeply curious about Jesus and Mary in Islam. We talked about religion in the Middle East for a while and I thought I would share that part of our conversation here, since it didn’t fit within the space available for the article that appears in today’s paper:
Do you ever plan to write the book about Jesus in Islam?
I had not thought about it for a long time, but since I’ve been traveling in the country, there seems to be a huge thirst for this topic. One thing I would be interested in writing about is a travel book, which would be about the Muslim holy land — which would be sort of what we think of as the Christian holy land but really showing how so many of these sites have been Islamic at one time or another. The tomb of Lazarus, for example, the Chapel of the Ascension, the birthplace of Jesus, the tomb of Mary — I mean, half of these places were at some period Muslim sites. To really be able to trace this story I think would be fun.
Islam developed after Christianity. Did Muslims take over these sites?
In very few cases. Mostly, they just shared them. They still do. For example, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Muslims go there all the time. The Milk Grotto, where tradition says Mary stopped to nurse Jesus, Muslim women go there to pray for the birth of their children. Muslims visit all of the monasteries that have to do with Mary in the Middle East. There are more dramatic examples: The tomb of Mary, which is a church in Jerusalem, next to the tomb, if you look really carefully, there is a mihrab right in the wall, which shows the direction of Mecca. It looks totally Christian and it’s full of Christian pilgrims, but this is an example of where the history has been lost and you have to dig up references and find it again. But most of the time they were shared spaces.
It was interesting to discover in your book how Muslims see Mary, and Jesus.
She’s enormous in Islam.
Where did the stories in the Quran about her and Jesus come from? How did they develop?
Well, it’s really impossible to talk about that with Muslims in a polite way because for them the stories didn’t develop; they came from God. So that’s a difficult conversation to have. But I can say that after I read the Quran, I was astonished when I was traveling in Istanbul and I went to the monastery of Chora and there on the ceiling was the entire story of Mary from the Quran. I thought, what’s this doing in a Christian monastery? Well, it turns out that this story had been in some of the apocryphal gospels. Some of those stories were part of early Christian tradition, but then the church decided they were not part of
When they were rejected.
Exactly. And then they were lost to most Christians. Even though to the church these gospels were apocryphal, they continued to be used in a lot of Middle Eastern monasteries far from the centers of power. So people could continue the traditions they wanted to without interference.
Some of the Christian sects in the Middle East, in Syria, that you write about, I don’t think most American Christians would recognize their practices.
And they’re ancient.
They go back to the origins of Christianity.
Right. And for me, this is a story that I feel has a real urgency because of the increasing migration of Christian communities from the region. Here’s a region that for most of the last few thousand years was extremely religiously diverse, and now very quickly, it’s losing that diversity. This isn’t just a region with Sunnis and Shias, but there are Kurds and Yazidis and Mandaeans and Assyrians and Greek Orthodox — I mean, the religious diversity is mind-boggling.
Is it inevitable that that diversity will disappear?
I would like to believe that it’s not inevitable but it certainly looks that way, especially since so much of it occurs in Iraq, and the war has sent so many of these communities fleeing. And a lot of them have been targeted, too, by religious extremists. In Iraq, you have the Mandaeans, followers of John the Baptist with really amazingly rich religious traditions, and unless their stories are told soon, they’ll be lost.