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The Book of Monasteries
A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East
The Book of Monasteries takes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.
Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and events that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear in the collection, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Al-Shābushtī uses these accounts not to teach history but to offer a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.
An English-only edition.
The Book of Monasteries takes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.
Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and events that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear in the collection, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Al-Shābushtī uses these accounts not to teach history but to offer a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.
An English-only edition.
- GenresLiterature
388 pages, Paperback
Published March 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 3, 2026
The Book of Monasteries offers a fascinating literary journey through the Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East. Al-Shābushtī's work brings together poetry, prose, anecdotes, and historical accounts connected with monasteries across Baghdad, Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, Iraq, and Egypt. Rather than presenting these sites only as religious institutions, the collection reveals them as places where different communities, cultures, and forms of intellectual and social life intersected.
One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its remarkable variety. Each monastery receives its own treatment, including discussion of its location and name alongside poems, stories, historical reports, political figures, celebrations, and dramatic events. The material creates a lively picture of Abbasid society and demonstrates how literature can preserve details about places and communities that might otherwise disappear from historical memory.
The collection is particularly valuable for the way it brings Muslim and Christian worlds into conversation. Al-Shābushtī, himself a Muslim literary anthologist, presents monasteries as important meeting points between Abbasid elites and Christian communities. This perspective gives the work relevance not only to medieval literary studies but also to readers interested in religious coexistence, cultural exchange, and the history of the Middle East.
There is also a thoughtful philosophical dimension beneath the entertaining stories. Accounts of wealth, pleasure, beauty, political power, generosity, tolerance, and eloquence repeatedly point toward the temporary nature of worldly achievements. The poetry and prose therefore work on several levels, offering both an engaging literary anthology and an opportunity to reflect on how Abbasid writers understood pleasure, power, morality, and human impermanence.
Overall, The Book of Monasteries is an impressive resource for readers interested in Arabic literature, medieval history, religious studies, Christian communities in the Middle East, and Abbasid culture. Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation makes this important work accessible to a wider readership, while the bilingual Arabic-English presentation adds value for students and scholars working with the original language.
One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its remarkable variety. Each monastery receives its own treatment, including discussion of its location and name alongside poems, stories, historical reports, political figures, celebrations, and dramatic events. The material creates a lively picture of Abbasid society and demonstrates how literature can preserve details about places and communities that might otherwise disappear from historical memory.
The collection is particularly valuable for the way it brings Muslim and Christian worlds into conversation. Al-Shābushtī, himself a Muslim literary anthologist, presents monasteries as important meeting points between Abbasid elites and Christian communities. This perspective gives the work relevance not only to medieval literary studies but also to readers interested in religious coexistence, cultural exchange, and the history of the Middle East.
There is also a thoughtful philosophical dimension beneath the entertaining stories. Accounts of wealth, pleasure, beauty, political power, generosity, tolerance, and eloquence repeatedly point toward the temporary nature of worldly achievements. The poetry and prose therefore work on several levels, offering both an engaging literary anthology and an opportunity to reflect on how Abbasid writers understood pleasure, power, morality, and human impermanence.
Overall, The Book of Monasteries is an impressive resource for readers interested in Arabic literature, medieval history, religious studies, Christian communities in the Middle East, and Abbasid culture. Hilary Kilpatrick's English translation makes this important work accessible to a wider readership, while the bilingual Arabic-English presentation adds value for students and scholars working with the original language.
October 5, 2026
The Book of Monasteries, by the Baghdadi itinerant scholar and librarian al-Shābushtī, is a 10th century tour of Christian monasteries in the Muslim world, with a focus on poetry, poets, and people associated with them. It is published as part of the NYU Library of Arabic Literature (one of several recent publication series modeled on the Harvard Loeb Classics), and translated by Hilary Kilpatrick in bilingual and just English editions; I read the latter.
Somewhere between an anthology of Arabic poetry and a collection of court gossip, al-Shābushtī takes his readers on a tour of the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, sharing beautiful poetry details on the Christian monasteries thriving under Muslim rule. The multiculturalism is striking: "Stopping one noon at Bāshahrā Convent, we met the priest, / A believer in Jesus, not doctrinaire or laying down rules, / But showing such kindness as to enthrall noble souls " (57).
The descriptions of Christian monasteries shattered my preconceptions: rather than cloistered sites of seclusion, in the Muslim world they were often located just outside metropolitan areas, and served as resting stops for travelers or sites of celebration and drunkenness for local Muslims looking to party it up or to indulge in whatever you’d call reverse-orientalism (those sensuous Christians with their wine and tempting virgin nuns!). “How many days in the shade of the convent / I spent, the pleasures of life pure, / Flirting with a slim, black-eyed beauty / pouring me sparkling musk-scented wine” (19). The monasteries are depicted as party-central: “One bender coming after another, / with sobriety put off till the wine had run out” (42). The lively intellectual and artistic culture of the time shows up in many different ways, with the bickering in verse between Abū Jafnah al-Qurashī and Abū l-Tayyib Muhammad in al-Qāsim al-Numayrī being a highlight.
Occasionally there’s also just a poem that’s very beautiful on its own: “The moon described your face’s beauty / till I thought I saw you – but no. / The perfume wafting from the tender daffodils / seemed like the scent of your youth. / Time after time my hopes that you’ve come are deceived / by the light of the moon and these flowers in their splendor, / Yet while I live, to the moon and the flowers / I’ll stay true for as long as they resemble you” (42-43).
While there’s much a lot that’s interesting and intriguing about this book, the critical apparatus ultimately wasn’t enough to help me through the extensive difficult and obscure parts. For example, take the homosexual love poetry: Muhammad ibn Abi Umayyah the scribe writes: “I grieve for a moon, a captive of the cloister, / human in form, in cunning a devil. / By God, when my eye fell on his beauty, / I yielded and freely abandoned my faith (19). Elsewhere, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Abbas ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi writes “When he came to me I cried, ‘Oh joy!’/ when he turned away, ‘Woe is me!’ / I stayed at the convent till it became home / for his sake, even wearing the habit and cross” (44-45). What's the context? What sexual dynamics existed at the top levels of the caliphate? How did faith and homosexual temptation intertwine? I didn’t find answers to these questions in the introduction or endnotes, and the index listing for “homosexuality” is missing both these poems as well as other clearly homosexual ones.
Beyond this, the scholarly apparatus is just not enough to orient a lay reader. Too few items explained and too many explanations simply sending you to academic scholarship elsewhere without so much as a summary. There were pages and pages where I simply was lost amid a sea of references to places, events, and names which were all unexplained, and I simply didn’t know what was being described or its significance. There's a glossary of names, but explanatory footnotes or endnotes would have been better so I didn't have to hunt thru an alphabetical list of names three times a page just to figure out who everyone was. This could have made room for some explanatory commentary on the various anecdotes and poems as well. This is maybe an unfair critique; the ambient diffusion of ancient Mediterranean or medieval culture is so intense, and have hundreds of years of intense scholarly focus on them, that I might just have very skewed expectations for how accessible an editor or translator can make a millennium old work of Arabic literature.
If you’re feeling adventurous and have patience to spare, there are some fun rewards in this book! Sadly, I gave up about halfway thru.
Somewhere between an anthology of Arabic poetry and a collection of court gossip, al-Shābushtī takes his readers on a tour of the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, sharing beautiful poetry details on the Christian monasteries thriving under Muslim rule. The multiculturalism is striking: "Stopping one noon at Bāshahrā Convent, we met the priest, / A believer in Jesus, not doctrinaire or laying down rules, / But showing such kindness as to enthrall noble souls " (57).
The descriptions of Christian monasteries shattered my preconceptions: rather than cloistered sites of seclusion, in the Muslim world they were often located just outside metropolitan areas, and served as resting stops for travelers or sites of celebration and drunkenness for local Muslims looking to party it up or to indulge in whatever you’d call reverse-orientalism (those sensuous Christians with their wine and tempting virgin nuns!). “How many days in the shade of the convent / I spent, the pleasures of life pure, / Flirting with a slim, black-eyed beauty / pouring me sparkling musk-scented wine” (19). The monasteries are depicted as party-central: “One bender coming after another, / with sobriety put off till the wine had run out” (42). The lively intellectual and artistic culture of the time shows up in many different ways, with the bickering in verse between Abū Jafnah al-Qurashī and Abū l-Tayyib Muhammad in al-Qāsim al-Numayrī being a highlight.
Occasionally there’s also just a poem that’s very beautiful on its own: “The moon described your face’s beauty / till I thought I saw you – but no. / The perfume wafting from the tender daffodils / seemed like the scent of your youth. / Time after time my hopes that you’ve come are deceived / by the light of the moon and these flowers in their splendor, / Yet while I live, to the moon and the flowers / I’ll stay true for as long as they resemble you” (42-43).
While there’s much a lot that’s interesting and intriguing about this book, the critical apparatus ultimately wasn’t enough to help me through the extensive difficult and obscure parts. For example, take the homosexual love poetry: Muhammad ibn Abi Umayyah the scribe writes: “I grieve for a moon, a captive of the cloister, / human in form, in cunning a devil. / By God, when my eye fell on his beauty, / I yielded and freely abandoned my faith (19). Elsewhere, ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Abbas ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Rabi writes “When he came to me I cried, ‘Oh joy!’/ when he turned away, ‘Woe is me!’ / I stayed at the convent till it became home / for his sake, even wearing the habit and cross” (44-45). What's the context? What sexual dynamics existed at the top levels of the caliphate? How did faith and homosexual temptation intertwine? I didn’t find answers to these questions in the introduction or endnotes, and the index listing for “homosexuality” is missing both these poems as well as other clearly homosexual ones.
Beyond this, the scholarly apparatus is just not enough to orient a lay reader. Too few items explained and too many explanations simply sending you to academic scholarship elsewhere without so much as a summary. There were pages and pages where I simply was lost amid a sea of references to places, events, and names which were all unexplained, and I simply didn’t know what was being described or its significance. There's a glossary of names, but explanatory footnotes or endnotes would have been better so I didn't have to hunt thru an alphabetical list of names three times a page just to figure out who everyone was. This could have made room for some explanatory commentary on the various anecdotes and poems as well. This is maybe an unfair critique; the ambient diffusion of ancient Mediterranean or medieval culture is so intense, and have hundreds of years of intense scholarly focus on them, that I might just have very skewed expectations for how accessible an editor or translator can make a millennium old work of Arabic literature.
If you’re feeling adventurous and have patience to spare, there are some fun rewards in this book! Sadly, I gave up about halfway thru.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews