ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an important part of Medieval Islamic-Armenian history falls, or rather must fall, under the heading of akritics or Borderlands history, with its own peculiar type of historicity. In medieval Armenian histories, the origin or the model, so to speak, of all Islamic-Armenian treatises was seen in the Medinan period of Islam and in a so-called "Prophet's Oath to Armenians". There came about a tradition, which acquired a historicity as an important aspect of Islamic-Armenian relations. The alliance of the heterodox factions with the Muslim side was a predictable and inevitable consequence of the situation in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, and which was anyway divided between the two. There was another factor in the evolution of Armenian dissidence, and that was Islamic dissidence. In Islam, dissident trends began appearing as of the first century of its advent.
