We're late to post this, but Professor Durmaz was interviewed earlier this summer at Dumbarton Oaks. Here's an excerpt:
In the storytelling world of antiquity, stories traveled across religious boundaries, which were often porous and fluid. In particular, a lot of people orally narrated saints’ stories. Through storytelling, people would learn about the world, be entertained, be exhorted and instructed. Storytelling was probably one of the strongest media that facilitated cultural transmission during this time.
Who was orally narrating saints’ stories in antiquity, and how? We think of bishops, for example, or monks, narrating hagiographical stories in liturgical or monastic contexts to their pious audiences. The practice was, however, much broader than that. Laypeople also told stories about saints, young and old, men and women. And this kind of storytelling was not restricted to monasteries and churches. In the markets, on the road to pilgrimage shrines, in family gatherings, and in other contexts people told stories. We have textual descriptions of these instances.
The early Islamic community participated actively in this world of storytelling. There were so-called transmitters of knowledge, who are very much venerated in the Islamic tradition. The material they transmitted, as preserved in later literature, suggests that many people in the early Islamic community had access to Christian and Jewish material. This knowledge was preserved and transmitted, in oral or written forms, in various contexts: for example, the family. Many of the early Muslim families had been Christians or Jews a generation or two earlier, so they still had an active memory of those cultures, and they transmitted those memories within the family.