Cultural assimilation to Arabic preceded and predicted Christian apostasy under Muslim rule

Evidence

Yet they again point out the difficulties faced by Christians in the emiral court. Christians were losing their distinctive Latin culture: none of the prominent court Christians, it seems, was capable of translating a letter to the Frankish king into Latin; an abbot from a nearby monastery had to be summoned. Christian authors of the following centuries translate Orosius and Isidore into Arabic for Christian readers who presumably cannot read Latin. Ostegesis did indeed write his accusations against Samson in Latin, but he apparently had a hard time of it, and Samson took pleasure in mocking him for his poor Latin. Loss of Latin, cultivation of Arabic letters, eager participation in court culture, circumcision: all this amounted, for writers like Samson, Alvarus, and Eulogius, to a prelude to apostasy. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Gives the reader concrete textual grounding for the mechanism by which Christian identity eroded under Islamic rule — useful evidence for their genealogical claims about Islam-West opposition.