Maximus the Confessor, also spelt Maximos, otherwise known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople, was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar.
Abu al-Abbas Abdallah ibn Harun al-Rashid, better known by his regnal name al-Ma'mun, was the seventh Abbasid caliph, who reigned from 813 until his death in 833. He succeeded his half-brother al-Amin after a civil war, during which the cohesion of the Abbasid Caliphate was weakened by rebellions and the rise of local strongmen; much of his domestic reign was consumed in pacification campaigns. Well educated and with a considerable interest in scholarship, al-Ma'mun promoted the Translation Movement, the flowering of learning and the sciences in Baghdad, and the publishing of al-Khwarizmi's book now known as "Algebra". He is also known for supporting the doctrine of Mu'tazilism and for imprisoning Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the rise of religious persecution (mihna), and for the resumption of large-scale warfare with the Byzantine Empire.
Abu Mansur Nizar, known by his regnal name as al-Aziz Billah, was the fifth caliph of the Fatimid dynasty, from 975 to his death in 996. His reign saw the capture of Damascus and the Fatimid expansion into the Levant, which brought al-Aziz into conflict with the Byzantine emperor Basil II over control of Aleppo. During the course of this expansion, al-Aziz took into his service large numbers of Turkic and Daylamite slave-soldiers, thereby breaking the near-monopoly on Fatimid military power held until then by the Kutama Berbers.
Faḍl ibn ʿAbbās was a brother of Abd Allah ibn Abbas and was a cousin of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Abu Muhammad Abdallah ibn Ahmad ibn Salimal-Aswani was a tenth-century Egyptian diplomat and Shia Muslim dāʿī (missionary) in the service of the Fatimids. Following the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, he was dispatched to Nubia by the Fatimid governor Jawhar al-Siqilli in 975 AD (365 AH) or perhaps a little earlier. He left a written record of his mission, the Kitāb Akhbār al-Nūba waʾl-Muḳurra wa ʿAlwa waʾl-Buja waʾl-Nīl. This is the only surviving eyewitness description of medieval Nubia other than the very brief account in Ibn Ḥawqal.
A patristic anthology, commonly called a florilegium, is a systematic collections of excerpts from the works of the Church Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers of the early period, compiled with a view to serve dogmatic or ethical purposes. These encyclopedic compilations are a characteristic product of the later Byzantine theological school, and form a very considerable branch of the extensive literature of the Greek Catenæ. They frequently embody the only remains of some patristic writings.
Qusta ibn Luqa, also known as Costa ben Luca or Constabulus (820–912) was a Syrian Melkite Christian physician, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and translator. He was born in Baalbek. Travelling to parts of the Byzantine Empire, he brought back Greek texts and translated them into Arabic.
Abū 'l-Ḥasan al-Muḫtār Yuwānnīs ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAbdūn ibn Saʿdūn ibn Buṭlān known as Ibn Buṭlān was a physician and Arab Christian theologian from Baghdad during the Abbasid era. He left his hometown for travels throughout the Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor during which he practiced medicine, studied, wrote, and engaged in intellectual debates most famously the Battle of the Physicians with Ibn Riḍwān. He was a first-hand witness of the Schism of 1054 in Constantinople, contributing a work to the discussions surrounding it for Patriarch Michael I Cerularius. After his time in Constantinople he remained in the Byzantine Empire, becoming a monk in Antioch during the end of the Macedonian Renaissance.
ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Ṣāliḥ ibn ʿAlī was a member of the Banu Abbas who served as general and governor in Syria and Egypt. He distinguished himself in several raids against the Byzantine Empire, but his great influence and authority in Syria resulted in Caliph Harun al-Rashid imprisoning him in 803. Released in 809, he was dispatched in 812 by Caliph al-Amin to gather troops against his brother al-Ma'mun in the ongoing civil war between the two brothers, but died of an illness.
Abu Bakr al-Kalabadhi, in full, Abu Bakr ibn Abi Ishaq Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub al-Bukhari al-Kalabadhi was a Persian Hanafi Maturidi Sufi scholar and the author of the Kitab at-ta'arruf, one of the most important works of Sufism composed during the first 300 years of Islam.
Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki was an Arab Orthodox translator and theologian active in Antioch during the middle of the eleventh century, during a period of renewed Byzantine rule over the city. He was responsible for a large number of patristic translations, as well as original theological and philosophical works.
Ibn Bashkuwāl, he was Khalaf ibn ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Mas'ud ibn Musa ibn Bashkuwāl ibn Yûsuf al-Ansârī, Abū'l-Qāsim, , was an influential Andalusian traditionist and biographer working in Córdoba and Seville.
Christopher was Chalcedonian Patriarch of Antioch from 960 to 967. A native of Baghdad who was originally named ʻĪsá, he moved to Syria under the rule of Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid emir of Aleppo, and took a job as secretary to a subordinate emir in Shaizar. He intervened in Church controversies in Antioch and its Christian residents selected him as the new patriarch upon the death of Agapius I.
As patriarch, Christopher undertook educational and charitable efforts to help his Christian subjects, including negotiations with Sayf al-Dawla for tax reduction. When a rebellion broke out in Antioch in 965, led by Rashiq al-Nasimi, Christopher took the side of the emir and withdrew to the monastery of Simeon Stylites in order to avoid interaction with the rebels. After the rebellion was finally suppressed, this made the patriarch a favorite at the court of Sayf al-Dawla, but created enemies within Antioch.
When Sayf al-Dawla died in early 967, Christopher's enemies took advantage of the momentary power vacuum and plotted against him. Although he was warned of this danger by a Muslim friend named Ibn Abī ʻAmr, Christopher chose to remain in Antioch. Accusing the patriarch of conspiring against Antioch with Sayf al-Dawla's allies and with the Byzantines, the plotters convinced a group of visiting soldiers from Khorasan to kill him on the night of May 23, 967. His head was cut off and his body was thrown into the Orontes River. Shortly thereafter, a group of local Christians found the body in the river and took it in secret to a local monastery, where Christopher began to be venerated as a martyr.
In late 969, the armies of Emperor Nikephoros II conquered Antioch, and the new patriarch of Antioch brought Christopher's body into the city for public veneration.
Ibrahim ibn Yuhanna was a Byzantine bureaucrat, translator, and author from Antioch in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. He held the title of protospatharios and is often identified by this title in Arabic sources. Little is known for certain about his life, but he recounts in the Life of Christopher that he was a child in Antioch in the time of Patriarch Christopher and just before, meaning the late 950s and early 960s. He evidently found success in the imperial bureaucracy after the Byzantines conquered Antioch in 969, given his elevated title. The Life describes events in the time of Patriarch Nicholas II (1025–1030), so Ibrahim must have lived at least to the very late 1020s.
The Life of Christopher is the only extant work authored by Ibrahim. It was originally composed in both Greek and Arabic, but only the Arabic version survives. On the other hand, it seems that the bulk of Ibrahim's scholarly work was devoted to Arabic translations of Greek theological texts. He is known to have translated homilies by Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom; a portion of the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; and panegyrics for the evangelists Luke and John from the Menologion of his contemporary Symeon the Metaphrast. He may also have been involved in administering imperial efforts to translate the Constantinopolitan liturgy into Syriac for use in the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, as indicated by a reference to "Abraham the king's scribe" in a 1056 Syriac Triodion manuscript in the British Library. However, there is no evidence that Ibrahim himself translated any texts into Syriac.
Rukn al-dīn Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad al-Malāḥimī al-Khuwārazmī was a Khwārazmian Islamic theologian of the Muʿtazilī and Ḥanafī schools. He wrote six works known by title, but of these only one is completely preserved and two partially; the rest are lost.
Abu'l-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Faraj ibn Ḥawshab ibn Zādān al-Najjār al-Kūfī, better known simply as Ibn Ḥawshab, or by his honorific of Manṣūr al-Yaman, was a senior Isma'ili missionary from the environs of Kufa. In cooperation with Ali ibn al-Fadl al-Jayshani, he established the Isma'ili creed in Yemen and conquered much of that country in the 890s and 900s in the name of the Isma'ili imam, Abdallah al-Mahdi, who at the time was still in hiding. After al-Mahdi proclaimed himself publicly in Ifriqiya in 909 and established the Fatimid Caliphate, Ibn al-Fadl turned against him and forced Ibn Hawshab to a subordinate position. Ibn Hawshab's life is known from an autobiography he wrote, while later Isma'ili tradition ascribes two theological treatises to him.
Al-As'ad ibn Muhadhdhab ibn Zakariyya ibn Kudama ibn Mina Sharaf al-Din Abu'l-Makarim ibn Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Malih ibn Mammati, better known simply by the family name Ibn Mammati, was an Egyptian official who served as head of the government departments under Saladin and his successor, al-Aziz Uthman, as well as being a noted poet and prolific writer.
Gerasimos was a Christian apologist and monk who wrote in Arabic. He lived in the Middle Ages, sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries.
Ḥabīb ibn Bahrīz, also called ʿAbdishoʿ bar Bahrīz, was a bishop and scholar of the Church of the East, famous for his translations from Syriac into Arabic. He also wrote original works on logic, canon law and apologetics.
The Kitāb al-wāḍiḥ bi-l-ḥaqq, known in Latin as the Liber denudationis, is a Copto-Arabic apologetic treatise against Islam. It was written by a Muslim convert to Christianity, Būluṣ ibn Rajāʾ, around 1010 in Fāṭimid Egypt. Its purpose is to provide a refutation of Islam on the basis of the Qurʾān and the ḥadīth (tradition). It was translated into Latin in the 13th century, probably in Toledo. It had much greater influence in translation than in its original language.
