ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the role of the hagiographic persona, or persons rendered in a hagiographic idiom, in the processes of 'conversion' in the early Islamic world. The conversion of the Platonic philosopher Marius Victorinus, for example, recollected by Augustine as part of his tale of his own conversion, was for Augustine not real, not complete, until it had become a social event in the city of Rome. The spectacle of a well-known pagan intellectual entering the church, the name of the convert running like an electric current across the lips of the Roman masses, had been the crucial event of the matter and the aspect of the conversion that seems to have most moved Augustine. Muslim texts of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries tended to emphasize themes of gentle and often romantic seduction of non-Muslims by refined and sophisticated Muslim men, resulting in conversion.