Thibaut Auplat

Please tell us about your research project.

My research is a translation and commentary of a corpus consisting of John Damascene’s twenty last Heresies (heresies 81-100) and Abu Qurrah’s Dialogues with a Muslim(sometimes referred to as opuscula islamica), offering the first French translation of the latter.

These two groups of texts are the first extant Greek testimonies on Islam, they were written by Chalcedonian Christians living in Muslim lands.

In my commentary, I take into account the context of production, the genre of the texts, and their style, but I alsofocus on the rhetorical strategies which the authors deploy to discredit Islam. This last aspect has not yet been thoroughly studied, but is particularly interesting as John Damascene and Abu Qurrah, within the constraints imposed by the genre of their writings, make use of a wide variety of strategies which reach beyond the use of logical reasoning as far as attempts to ridicule the opponents.

This research is a reassessment of sources which, notably in the case of Abu Qurrah, have been more studied from a theological point of view than a philological. For example, I work on the concepts of irony or raillery which, I argue, are suited to describe the style of these texts.

This, in turn, should transform our perception of the use of humor in interfaith dialogue in the 8th and 9th c. andprovides significant insight into Christian–Muslim relations in the late Umayyad and early Abbassid Caliphate.

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

My program is a PhD contract from Aix-Marseille Université in partnership with the Maison Française d’Oxford. During the three years of the program, I will spend one year in total at the MFO, divided into three periods: three months in 2022 for Michaelmas Term, six months in 2024 for Hilary and Trinity Terms, and three months in the summer of 2025.

Impressions of Oxford University?

The University of Oxford offers a lot of learning opportunities through its complex network of faculties, institutes, societies and colleges. I am trying to seize as many opportunities as possible, while being careful not to wander pointlessly. In my case, I have the chance to attend Syriac classes and some lectures at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.