Making Christians in the Umayyad Levant: Anastasius of Sinai and Christian Rites of Maintenance.

Toward the end of the seventh century, Anastasius of Sinai took it upon himself to offer advice to lay Christians facing a new Umayyad world. For Anastasius, Christian identity needed simplification. In his Edifying Tales and Questions and Answers, he would de-emphasize theology, arguing that Christian identity was a more basic affair, involving baptism, the eucharist and the sign of the cross. For him, these were 'rites of maintenance', acts which sustained Christian identity in a fluid world of religious alternatives. Such actions warded off the demonic and drew a clear boundary between Muslim and Christian. This was important for Anastasius, who considered it his pastoral duty to offer uneducated Christians a tangible sense of their own identity (and superiority). His ritualistic simplification bears witness to an important shift in Palestinian-centred Christianity, as intra-Christian disputes were set aside in an attempt to maintain a ritualistic boundary between Christian and non-Christian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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