The following are my notes from the book “Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World” by Michael Philip Penn.
But when Muslims first encountered Christians they did not meet Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople, nor did they meet Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean. Rather, they first encountered Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living primarily in what constitutes present-day Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and eastern Turkey, these Syriac Christians were under Muslim rule from the seventh century onward. (p.2)
Under Muslim rule, Syriac churches expanded to form the most geographically extensive branch of Christianity the late ancient and early medieval world had ever seen. Under Islam, Syriac churches stretched from Asia Minor and throughout the Middle East through Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkestan into India, Tibet, and China. In the Islamic Empire, elite members of this expansive church held key government positions, attended the caliph’s court in Baghdad, collaborated with Muslim scholars to translate Greek science and philosophy into Arabic, accompanied Muslim leaders on their campaigns against the Byzantines, and helped fund monasteries through donations from Muslims—including money from the caliph himself. Syriac Christians ate with Muslims, married Muslims, bequeathed estates to Muslim heirs, taught Muslim children, and were soldiers in Muslim armies. Members of the Syriac churches had a very different experience of Islam than did most Greek and Latin Christians. (p.3)
Muslims requesting Christian exorcists, attending church, seeking healing from Christian holy men, visiting Christian shrines, and endowing Christian monasteries. There are also references to Christians attending Muslim festivals, becoming circumcised, referring to Muḥammad as God’s messenger, and draping their altar with a Muslim confession of faith. (p.4)
Although Syriac Christians had a more direct knowledge of Islam than did most other Christians, they were surprisingly resistant to defining Islam as entirely other. Instead, they frequently denied Islam its alterity and depicted it as a derivative form of Christianity. Syriac narratives of identity often minimized the conceptual distance between Christianity and Islam as an apologetic strategy. (p.11)
The earliest text I examine was written in the midst of the conquest of Syria in the late 630s. The most recent text I consider was written in the 860s. After that time, most Christians under Muslim rule no longer wrote in Syriac, a primarily Christian language. Instead, they wrote mainly in Arabic, a language increasingly used by both Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the Islamic empire. (p.12)
Contrary to the well-known maxim, history is not always written by the winners. The earliest and most extensive descriptions of the Islamic conquests were composed not by victorious Muslims but by defeated Christians. (p.16)
There are almost no surviving Islamic references to the conquests that can be securely dated to before 750. In contrast there are over a dozen surviving Syriac conquest accounts written before the Abbasid revolution, and another handful written during the first Abbasid century. (p.16)
Up to this point, all Syriac conquests accounts shared the view epitomized in the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius: the Islamic conquests were bad news for Syriac Christians. Only with the mid-ninth-century Chronicle of Dionysius of Tel Maḥrē were the events of the 630s sufficiently distant to be radically reassessed and recast as a liberation from Byzantine tyranny. By examining Syriac conquest accounts not as sources for positivist history but as a record of collective memory, one can observe—in the broadest terms—how changing circumstances and changing memories interacted with each other. (p.18)
For most of the seventh century, Syriac authors did not anticipate that their conquerors would be around very long, they did not speak about Islam as a religion, and they certainly did not depict the conquests as a clash of civilizations. (p.19)
Earliest Mention of Muhammad From Syriac Sources
The earliest surviving reference to the Islamic conquests appears in very modest trappings. The sixth-century manuscript British Library Add. 14,461 contains a Syriac translation of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.12 The Gospel of Matthew begins on the codex’s second page and initially left the first page blank. In 637 an anonymous writer used this extra space to compose an eyewitness report of the conquests. Now called the Account of 637, this one-page note is poorly preserved and, because of numerous lacunae, remains frustratingly incomplete: (p. 19-20)
Account of 637
. . . Muḥammad . . . [p]riest, Mār Elijah . . . and they came . . . and . . . and from . . . strong . . . month . . . and the Romans . . . And in January the . . . of Emessa received assurances for their lives. Many villages were destroyed through the killing by . . . Muḥammad and many were killed. And captives . . . from the Galilee to Bēt . . . And those Arabs camped by . . . And we saw . . . everywhe[re] . . . and the . . . that they . . . and . . . them. And on the tw[enty-si]xth of May, . . . went . . . from Emesa. And the Romans pursued them . . . And on the tenth . . . the Romans fled from Damascus . . . many, about ten thousand. And the follow- ing [ye]ar, the Romans came. On the twentieth of August in the year n[ine hundred and forty-]seven [i.e., 636 CE] there assembled in Gabitha . . . the Romans and many people . . . [R]omans were ki[lled], about fifty thousand . . . In the year nine hundred and for[ty-eight]. (p.19-20)
Khuzistan Chronicle (c. 660)
“God brought against them the Sons of Ishmael [who were as numerous] as sand upon the sea shore. Their leader was Muḥammad. Neither walls nor gates nor armor nor shield withstood them and they took control of the entire Persian Empire. And Yazdgard sent countless troops against them and the ṭayyāyē destroyed all of them.” (p.21)
A different strategy for minimizing the conquests’ significance appeared in two early eighth-century texts that spoke about Arab rulers. The first was a brief caliph list written between 705 and 715. The list began: “[In] the year 932 of Alexander, the son of Philip the Macedonian [= 620/621 CE], Muḥammad entered the land. He reigned seven years. After him, Abū Bakr reigned: two years. After him, Umar reigned: twelve years. After him, Uthmān reigned: twelve years. After him . . .” The record continues to the beginning of Caliph Walid’s reign in 705. What made the sequence particularly striking was its detached presentation. The prophet Muḥammad was just like any other king. There was no need to explain the conquests. One king followed the other, just as in any other kingdom. The author stripped the memories of the conquests of any overarching trauma or meaning and simply buried them within a list of relatively mundane political changes. (p. 35)
Syriac sources preserved many of the world’s first references to Muḥammad. In the earliest ones, Muḥammad’s name appeared in a military context. Just a few years after his death, the Account of 637 and the Chronicle ad 640 spoke of battles between Byzantine forces and “the ṭayyāyē of Muḥammad.” It remains uncertain whether these authors thought Muḥammad led the conquests or whether they simply used the phrase most often translated as “the Arabs of Muḥammad” to distinguish the ṭayyāyē responsible for the conquests from other ṭayyāyē. Later Syriac works more explicitly claimed that Muḥammad led the conquests. For example, in the 660s, the Khuzistan Chronicle referred to Muḥammad as the leader (mdabbrānā) of the Sons of Ishmael, whom God sent to destroy the Persians. A century later, Timothy I said that God “brought low before [Muḥammad’s] feet” the Byzantine and the Persian kingdoms. The Chronicle of Zuqnin stated that the ṭayyāyē “under [Muḥammad’s] leadership had conquered the Romans in battle.” Regardless of the historicity of such claims, over time Christians increasingly connected the conquests with Muḥammad himself. (p. 106)
Muslims = Non-Trinitarian Christians (Muhammad Rasullah)
Thomas’s story presented two perspectives on Christian orthodoxy. From the perspective of the congregants, Christianity need not be Trinitarian. These characters initially saw nothing unorthodox about a denial of Jesus’ divine Sonship. From the perspective of the character Māran-ammeh (and, one suspects, that of Thomas and his implied readership), Christianity needed to be much more clearly distinguished from Islam. In this narrative, Māran-ammeh’s miracle facilitated the triumph of this more stringently delineated version of Christianity over a more amorphously defined version. With Thomas’s story, however, we remain in the realm of literary depiction. This battle over the boundaries of orthodoxy took a more concrete form in a rarely studied British Library manuscript that was briefly discussed in Chapter 3. British Library Additional 14,643 has been dated on paleographic grounds to the mid-eighth century. At its end appears a Syriac translation of an originally Arabic caliph list. The list finished with the reign of the caliph Yazid, suggesting that the Arabic version was written before Yazid’s death in 724 and was fairly soon afterward translated into Syriac. The list’s incipit initially read: “A notice concerning: the life of Muḥammad the messenger [rasulā] of God.” The willingness of an eighth-century Syriac translator to refer to Muḥammad as God’s messenger should surprise anyone who suggests an early, clear separation between Christian and Muslim beliefs. (p163)
Although calling Muḥammad God’s rasūl seems to have been acceptable to at least one eighth-century Christian, it did not remain that way. In its current state, this page of British Library Add. 14,643 now contains two erasures. A later reader, obviously concerned about defining Muḥammad as God’s messenger, erased the problematic term rasulā. Either he or another reader also erased two letters from a word found earlier in the same line. As a result of these erasures, the original incipit, “A record of the life of Muḥammad, the messenger of God,” was transformed into “The record that Muḥammad [is] of God is rejected.” These manuscript changes graphically illustrate an important trajectory of early Christian-Muslim interactions. The eighth-century stratum challenges our belief in a strong distinction between the categories of early Christianity and early Islam. Here was a bilingual Christian scribe who had access to an Arabic caliph list and likely considered unproblematic the claim that Muḥammad was God’s messenger—a statement he repeated verbatim in his translation and passed along, without comment, to future readers. The latter stratum shows that this degree of religious overlap was unacceptable to later Christians. A later reader quite literally erased this ambiguity and replaced it with interreligious polemic as he attempted to firm up the very categorical boundaries the earlier text had elided. (p. 163-164)
Muhammad Not Part of the Shahadah, Late 7th Century (c. 684)
This divergence of opinions over how strictly one should draw the line between Christianity and Islam was not restricted to one of Thomas’s stories and one of the British Library’s manuscripts. It also motivated one of Jacob of Edessa’s legal decisions. Although Jacob wrote this decree in the late seventh or early eighth century, it survived only in a thirteenth-century canon collection edited by Barhebraeus. Barhebraeus cited Jacob as ruling that a cloth embroidered with the “Hagarene confession of faith” (tawditā hāgāraytā) could not be reused as a Christian altar covering. Jacob’s decision tried to clearly demarcate a ritual object as exclusively Christian and to avoid mixing elements he considered Hagarene with those he considered Christian. Besides the obvious issue of how Jacob’s audience obtained this cloth in the first place, his ruling also begged the question: how could seventh-century Christians have even considered draping the proclamation of a rival faith over their altar? Whereas Jacob saw the embroidered cloth as belonging to a rival faith, the congregants may have had a very different perspective. What Jacob labeled as Hagarene, they may have seen simply as monotheistic and not mutually exclusive with Christianity. This hypothesis gains further support when one considers that many late seventh-century witnesses to the shahāda (Muslim confession of faith) did not yet include a reference to Muḥammad but simply read, “there is no God but God.” (p. 164)
Early Syriac Sources Downplayed The Rise of Islam
Even a brief survey of the earliest ways that Syriac Christians commemorated the conquests suggests that their authors felt they had much more pressing issues to address than the rise of Islam. Although the scant attention these early authors paid to the conquests may surprise modern readers, it was perfectly understandable given their historical context. For the majority of seventh-century Syriac Christians, the most involved geopolitical changes came not with the Islamic conquests of the 630s but from the Byzantine-Persian wars from 602 to 628, which were much more destructive than the Islamic conquests. (p.24)
More Attention to the Rise of Islam during the Reign of Abd al-Malik
Circumstances in the middle of the seventh century motivated Syriac writers to allude only briefly to the conquests. Soon after the composition of Pseudo-Ephrem and the Life of Maximus, however, the political situation drastically shifted, forcing Syriac Christians to reevaluate how they remembered the conquests. Of particular import were the changes brought about through the consolidation of Umayyad rule under the caliph cAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) and his policies of Islamization. With ‘Abd al-Malik, the caliphate took an active role in championing Islam, promoting it as the supersessionary, state-sponsored religion of an increasingly Islamic empire. (p.25)
*Pseudo-Ephrem is not a real historical author, but a scholarly label for an anonymous Syriac writer (or writers) who composed works falsely attributed to Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373). It is presumed to have been written between 640-680 CE.
*Life of Maximus written by George of Resh’aina, is presumed to have been written ~680 CE
Book of Main Points (687 CE) written by the East Syrian monk John bar Penkāyē
Indeed, we should not consider their coming to be ordinary. For it was a divine deed. Prior to summoning them, He had previously prepared them to hold Christians in honor. Thus there also carefully came from God a certain commandment that they should hold our monastic order in honor. And when they came in accord with a divine commandment, they seized—so to say—the two kingdoms without war or difficulty. Thus, with neither armor nor human wiles, in a despised fashion like a brand snatched from a fire, God thus gave victory into their hands so that what was written concerning them could be fulfilled: “One pursued a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight” [Deut. 30:30]. For, apart from divine aid, how could naked men riding with neither armor nor shield be victorious? He summoned them from the ends of the earth to devastate a sinful kingdom and with them humble the arrogance of the Sons of Persia. (p.26-27)
Islamic View After 2nd Fitna: Christians Punished by Arabs For Their Sinful Behavior
Toward the end of the second fitna, Muslim proclamations of faith as well as polemics against Christian theology began to appear on mile markers, coins, and, most prominently, the newly constructed Dome of the Rock. (p.28)
Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (c. after 2nd fitna 690/691)
It was not because God loves them that He allowed them to enter and take control of the Christians’ kingdom, rather on account of the iniquity and sin done by Christians, the like of which was not done by any previous generation. For men would clad themselves in the wanton clothes of prostitutes and would adorn themselves like virgins. Standing openly on the cities’ streets, shamelessly rabid with drunkenness and lasciviousness, they would have sex with each other. Prostitutes also would openly stand on the streets. A man would enter, fornicate, and go out. And his son would come and defile himself in the very same woman. Brothers, fathers, and sons together would all defile themselves in one woman. (p.29)
Edessene Apocalypse (Written a Few Years After Pseudo-Methodius). Mention of Mecca.
A year or two after Pseudo-Methodius’s initial composition, a writer from the city of Edessa created an abridged and modified version of Pseudo-Methodius that modern scholars most often call the Edessene Apocalypse. Although heavily dependent on Pseudo-Methodius, the Edessene Apocalypse made several important changes to its source’s apocalyptic schema that augmented the emphasis on sacred space. Unlike Pseudo-Methodius, the Edessene Apocalypse specified that both the Sons of Ishmael and a horde of unclean nations from the North would be defeated in Mecca, that the city of Edessa would remain inviolate, and that Christ’s final victory would follow two reconquests of Jerusalem. (p. 30-31)
Establishing Jerusalem As an Islamic Center & Incentivizing Christians to Convert
During the early eighth century, state officials frequently intervened in church affairs, and there slowly emerged additional anti-Christian measures, such as forbidding non-Muslims from giving legal testimony against Muslims. Changes in tax policy also affected Syriac communities. During the seventh century, conversion to Islam would not lessen a convert’s tax liability. But Abd al-Malik’s nephew, Umayyad caliph Umar II (r. 717–720), legislated that converts to Islam no longer had to pay the jizya (poll tax). It took decades for Umar II’s tax reform to be put into widespread practice. Nevertheless, officially tying the tax rate to religious affiliation represented an important shift in Umayyad policy. (p. 34)
According to the Bēt Ḥālē Disputation [c. 720s], Christians’ military defeat actually signified their kinship to God. Because Christians were God’s children, God chastised them so they would learn to become worthy heirs. (p.39)
From Umayyad to Abbasid Rule
The change from Umayyad to Abbasid rule in 750 dramatically affected Syriac Christians’ collective memories of the conquests in terms of both how often they wrote about the 630s and how they chose to remember them. (p.40)
In 767, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur moved the capital of the Islamic empire from Damascus to the newly constructed city of Baghdad. (p.40)
Early Abbasid society also began a widespread translation project in which Abbasid authorities and private elites sought to translate all available texts of Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. Because many of these works had already been translated from Greek into Syriac, Syriac scholars were active participants in the Abbasid translation movement. The Abbasid translation movement also popularized Aristotelian logic, which became a common intellectual currency shared by Christians and Muslims. Several early Abbasid rulers also popularized public religious debates that provided a more formalized venue for religious exchange. At the same time, cities and towns had increasingly mixed populations that, combined with the ongoing effects of Arabicization, facilitated everyday contact between Christians and Muslims. (p. 40)
During the Abbasid period, conversion to Islam became increasingly prevalent and eventually led to a substantial decrease in the number of Syriac Christians. (p. 40)
During the early Abbasid period, a set of legal traditions designed to differentiate dhimmī (non-Muslims) from Muslims began to reach its classical form, the so-called Pact of cUmar.102 Scholars continue to debate how often regulations on the appearance and behavior of dhimmī were actually enforced.103 Nevertheless, it remains clear that over time these rules, which Muslim authors attributed to Caliph cUmar (d. 644), became increasingly discriminatory and more frequently implemented. The result was unexpected reversals of fortune, such as one caliph befriending and another imprisoning the East Syrian catholicos, as well as seemingly contradictory behavior, such as one of the most anti-Christian caliphs having a Christian chief physician. (p.41)
Theophilus’s account also focused on Sophronius and cUmar’s peaceful, collegial encounter to model for his eighth-century audience how cooperation between Christian and Muslim elites could benefit both communities. It remains unlikely that Theophilus knew the complete circumstances of how Jerusalem, the other cities of Syria, or even his own Edessa were conquered in the 630s. For him, however, memories of these events had a direct relevance for contemporary politics. Regardless of how detailed his knowledge of seventh-century history actually was, Theophilus could not afford to retell the conquests without including anecdotes of key cities peacefully surrendering and their Christian inhabitants gaining assurance of benevolent treatment. (p.43)
Chronicle Written By Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785)
Theophilus’s narrative resulted in an increased permeability between past and present and an important shift in culpability. The Chronicle projected the late Umayyad and early Abbasid regulation of Christian displays of the cross back to the conquest of Jerusalem.114 Theophilus then placed the blame for this anticross policy not on Muslim rulers but on Judaism; according to his Chronicle, opposition to the cross did not stem from a theological conflict between Islam and Christianity but from an early misunderstanding brought about by malicious Jews. Theophilus’s Chronicle represented a much more politically savvy form of collective memory. Because narratives of the past now influenced present-day law, memory crafting became a central way for Syriac elites to affect Abbasid treatment of Christians. (p.43)
Chronicle of Zuqnin (c. 775–780 CE)
Unlike Theophilus’s work, the Chronicle of Zuqnin did not use conquest narratives to model interfaith cooperation. The author also made a sharp distinction between pre-Abbasid Muslims, whom he called ṭayyāyē, and Abbasid-era Muslims, whom he called “Persians.” (p. 45)
* ṭayyāyē was a common term for Arabs
Timothy 1 (c. 780s)
Timothy alluded to the conquests in a letter detailing a discussion he had with al-Mahdi.120 Partway through their conversation, the caliph asked the rather sensitive question of what the catholicos thought about Muḥammad. Timothy began his carefully worded answer with a list of reasons that Muḥammad was a praiseworthy man who walked on the paths of the prophets. In this context, Timothy stated that, because of Muḥammad’s monotheism, God “honored him exceedingly and subjected two powerful kingdoms to his control. . . . The former kingdom, that is the Kingdom of the Persians, worshipped creatures instead of the Creator. The latter, that is the Kingdom of the Romans [i.e., the Byzantines], attributed suffering and mortality to the one who cannot suffer and die.” (p. 45-46)
Christian authors in the first century following the conquests were adamant that God giving the ṭayyāyē military success had nothing to do with their relative virtue. But now in the 780s, the head of the East Syrian church openly proclaimed that God gave victory directly to Muḥammad as a sign of divine approval. The moral Timothy draws from his brief reference to the conquests was not a call for Christian repentance nor a portent of Islam’s imminent demise. Rather: “Who will not praise [Muḥammad] . . . the one whom God has praised, and will not weave a crown of glory and exaltation to the one whom God has glorified and exalted?” (p. 46)
Al-Mahdi also charged, and Timothy refuted, that Christians had purposefully tampered with scriptural texts and removed all biblical references to Muḥammad’s prophethood (taḥrīf ). (p. 79)
Dionysius of Tel Maḥrē (c. 845)
Dionysius further accused the Byzantines of torturing the native population to discover where they had hidden their possessions. As a result, the Syriac Christians welcomed the ṭayyāyē on their successful return from defeating the Byzantines. (p. 49)
Almost two hundred years after the conquests, Dionysius of Tel Maḥrē wrote a radically different version of the conquests in which ṭayyāyē military victory served not simply as punishment for Byzantine theological error but also as redemption for Syriac orthodoxy. In his narrative, the ṭayyāyē and their initially benevolent policies toward Syriac Christians become a foil to Byzantine persecution of Miaphysites. Unfortunately, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors have read Dionysius’s work uncritically as an objective description of the conquests and their reception. The result has been a widespread myth that, during the conquests, Syriac Christians conspired with Muslims against the Byzantines and welcomed the Arabs with open arms. The first two hundred years of Syriac conquest accounts easily disprove this contention. The contrast between Dionysius and earlier commemorations of the conquests also reminds us that Dionysius’s accounts often revealed much more about the ninth century than they did about the seventh. (p. 49)
Contrary to many modern accounts that portray Syriac Christians as welcoming Muslim rule, until Dionysius’s Chronicle, written two centuries after the conquests themselves, Syriac sources were unanimous in seeing the conquests as a lamentable development. (p. 51)
Fuzzy Boundaries Between Islam and Christianity
In the seventh through ninth centuries, however, the generality we call Islam was still in its conceptual infancy, and the boundaries between early Christianity and early Islam remained imprecise. (p. 54)
Syriac narratives of Islam had no fixed reference, as Islamic beliefs and practices frequently changed during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. (p. 55)
By the end of the Umayyad era, Syriac narratives began to depict Muslims as presenting explicit theological challenges to Christianity, and listed Muslims alongside followers of other religions. After the Abbasid revolution, Syriac authors knew a great deal more about Islam. Their apologetics and polemics often cited Qur’anic passages and took full advantage of the shared intellectual currency of Aristotelian logic and Greek science brought about by the Abbasid translation movement. Nevertheless, even later Syriac authors often minimized distinctions between Christianity and Islam. (p.55)
Syriac terminology further complicates an investigation into seventh- through ninth-century descriptions of Islam. Syriac writers often spoke of “Judaism” (ihudāyutā), “Christianity” (krisṭyānutā), and “Zoroastrianism” (mgushutā = “Magianism”). An analogous abstract noun for Islam, however, did not appear until a late eighth-century chronicle once used the word mashlmānutā (“Muslimness”), a term extant texts did not again employ until the twelfth century.8 In all other cases, rather than using an abstract noun for a collective entity (what we call Islam), early Syriac writers instead referred to individuals (what we call Muslims). Even here the situation was more complex than in English because there never emerged a single Syriac word for Muslims. Instead, over time Syriac authors adapted or coined various expressions to speak of their conquerors. Exploring the evolution of these terms provides important information concerning Syriac perceptions of Islam. Prior to the conquests, numerous Syriac writings used the word ṭayyāyē to speak of people whom we most often call Arabs.9 Nevertheless, the trans- lation “Arabs” can be extremely misleading, in part because of the difference between ancient and modern views of ethnicity and religion. (p. 56-57)
Fortunately, many of the terms Syriac Christians employed to speak of their conquerors are traditionally translated using names such as Hagarenes or Saracens. Because modern English speakers so rarely use these words, they retain some of the flexibility found in the Syriac. But others words, such as those most commonly translated as Arabs (ṭayyāyē, singular ṭayyāyā) and pagans (ḥanpē, singular ḥanpā) are overdetermined in English. (p.57)
Labeling their conquerors as “Sons of Hagar,” “Sons of Ishmael,” and “Ishmaelites,” Syriac Christians deployed biblical genealogies to suggest that, despite their military success, the conquerors remained inferior to the conquered. These two strategies were especially prevalent in the seventh century, when their emphasis on lineage resonated with the strong connection in early Islam between tribal affiliation and being part of the Muslim umma (community). (p. 58)
Nevertheless, over time, Syriac narratives of identity developed a newer discourse that emphasized religious characteristics. For example, in the seventh century there could be Christian ṭayyāyē and non-Christian ṭayyāyē. But in some ninth-century texts, ṭayyāyē took on greater religious valence and the phrase “a Christian ṭayyāyē” became a contradiction in terms, for now all ṭayyāyē were, by definition, Muslims. (p. 59)
Being Muslim = Being Arab
Contrary to many present-day stereotypes of early Islam, throughout much of the seventh and early eighth centuries, admission into the umma was reserved exclusively for Arabs. Religious conversion was predicated on ethnic conversion. For a non-Arab to become Muslim, that individual first had to gain membership in an Arab tribe by becoming the mawlā (client) of an Arab sponsor.15 From a seventh-century Islamic perspective, ethnicity and religion were not independent variables. All Muslims were Arabs, and ideally all Arabs were Muslims. It is thus not surprising that the earliest conquest accounts, such as the Account of 637 and the Chronicle ad 640, designated their conquerors with ethnically inflected terms. The ways they used the Syriac word ṭayyāyē made them seem unaware (or at least uninterested) in religious difference. They employed a primarily racial term to designate a group of foreign, military conquerors. For these authors, there was nothing Islamic about the conquests or the victors. (p. 59)
East Syrian catholicos Isho’yahb III (d. 659)
For also these ṭayyāyē to whom at this time God has given rule over the world, behold [how] they are toward us. Not only, as you know, do they not oppose Christianity. Rather, they are givers of praise to our faith, givers of honor to our Lord’s priests and holy ones, and givers of aid to churches and monasteries. Indeed how did your inhabitants of Mzwn forsake their [own] faith [haymānutun] on pretext of theirs? And this when, as even the Mzwnāye say, the ṭayyāyē did not force them to forsake their faith [haymānutun]. To keep their faith [haymānutun] they only asked them to forsake half of their possessions. (p. 60)
Maronite Chronicle (c. 660s) & Muāwiya (d. 680)
According to the Maronite Chronicle, in the late 650s Mu’āwiya judged a theological debate between the Maronites and the Miaphysites. The Maronite Chronicle claimed that Mu’awiya declared the Maronites to be the winners and subsequently fined the Miaphysites 20,000 denarii. Much to the chronicler’s dismay, the Miaphysite patriarch soon used this to his advantage and continued to pay 20,000 denarii each year to persuade the caliph to protect the Miaphysites from the Maronites.27 The second episode took place the following year. According to the Maronite Chronicle, as part of his coronation in Jerusalem, Mu’āwiya prayed first at Golgotha, then at Gethsemane, then at Mary’s tomb.28 The third reference was a brief allusion to Mu’āwiya’s minting of gold and silver coins that, unlike Byzantine coins, were not imprinted with a cross.29 This narrative of a caliph who adjudicated intra-Christian debates and prayed at Christian holy sites but refused to mint coins with a cross reminds us that characters found in early Syriac sources often defy our attempts to pigeonhole them in easily defined, mutually exclusive religious categories. (p. 62)
The Miaphysite Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephrem and the Maronite Anti-Life of Maximus the Confessor most likely also predated the second fitna (civil war). As with most other documents from this time period, their depictions of the ṭayyāyē (in the Anti-Life) or the Sons of Hagar (in Pseudo-Ephrem) had little religious valence. The only detail one obtains about their beliefs and practices is that according to Pseudo-Ephrem, they upheld the “covenant of Abraham,” most likely a reference to circumcision. Otherwise, they simply acted as God’s scourge to punish sin and Christian heresy. (p. 62-63)
But even if we were to combine information from all of these sources, the sum total would be the following: these people, most often called ṭayyāyē, were relatively benevolent toward Christianity and could be helpful allies when battling other Christians. According to one source, they had a faith whose content remained unspecified, and they may have provided financial disincentives for people to remain Christian. According to a second, they kept the “covenant of Abraham.” According to a third, one of their rulers once prayed at Christian holy sites but nevertheless minted coins without the sign of the cross. From the perspective of Syriac Christians, this did not make a religion. (p.63)
Distinction Between Muslim & Christian during Abd al-Malik (r. )
The desire of ‘Abd al-Malik and his descendants to promote their religion motivated them to change the coinage by replacing Christian iconography with verses from the Qur’an, regulate the public display of Christian symbols, and correlate legal rights with religious affiliation. Only after the caliphate’s increasing emphasis on religious distinction did Syriac authors draw greater attention to their conquerors’ religion. ‘Abd al-Malik’s nephew, Caliph ‘Umar II (r. 718–720), instituted perhaps the most influential change in this ongoing policy of Islamization when he began to assess taxes not on the basis of lineage but on the basis of religion. Prior to ‘Umar II, the main way to be exempt from the jizya (poll tax) was by being born Arab. In most cases, even the process of becoming the client of an Arab sponsor and then joining the umma did not result in a change of tax status. That is, the poll tax remained tied primarily to natal not religious affiliation. Although his policy changes were not consistently implemented until well after his death, cUmar II declared non-Arab converts exempt from the poll tax.33 From this point on, the caliphate presented a religion that, at least in theory, transcended ethnic difference. ‘Umar II may also have begun a series of evolving regulations that tried to more clearly distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims.34 Throughout the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, these restrictions on non-Muslims would become further developed and eventually codified into the so-called Pact of cUmar. (p. 64)
Only at this point did Syriac writers first discuss their conquerors in terms that began to approximate our modern usage of words such as Muslim and Islam.
John bar Penkāyē’s Book of Main Points (687 CE) Regarding
Caliph Mu’āwiya (r. 661 to 680 CE)
Justice flourished in his days and there was great peace in the regions he controlled. He allowed everyone to conduct himself as he wanted. For, as I said above, they upheld a certain commandment from him who was their guide concerning the Christian people and the monastic order. By this one’s guidance they also upheld the worship of one God in accord with the customs of ancient law. And, at their beginning, they upheld the tradition of their instructor Muḥammad such that they would bring the death penalty upon whoever seemed to have dared [transgress] his laws. (p.65)
John, however, did not take the next step and use his increased knowledge to present his conquerors as a separate religious entity the way he portrayed Judaism or Zoroastrianism. Given his apocalyptic perspective, it is unlikely that John felt that the Sons of Hagar would be around long enough to justify their truly having their own religion. (p. 65)
Jacob of Edessa (d. 708)
According to Jacob, Muslims prayed toward the Kaaba; they believed that although Jesus is the Messiah, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, He was not God’s son; and they had a written profession of faith. (p. 66)
First Letter to John the Stylite (c. 685–708 CE)
John: “If a Christian should become a Hagarene or become a ḥanpā and, after a while, he should regret [this] and return from his ḥanputā, I want to learn whether it is right for him to be baptized or if by this he has been stripped of the grace of baptism.”
Jacob: “On the one hand, it is not right for a Christian who becomes a Hagarene or becomes a ḥanpā to be [re]baptized. . . . But concerning whether he had been stripped of the grace of baptism because he became a Hagarene, I have this to say . . .”
John and the Emir (c. 690–720 CE)
John and the Emir claimed to be a letter written by an unnamed companion of John Sedra, the seventh-century Miaphysite patriarch of Antioch. The text related an alleged conversation between the patriarch and an unspecified Hagarene leader in which the emir presented several brief questions to John, who provided more lengthy responses. The emir’s questions highlighted the issues that Syriac Christians found most pressing in their theological debates, real and imagined, with Muslims. (p. 70)
For example, in John and the Emir Christians and Hagarenes had different views of scriptural authority. The author seemed to believe that Hagarenes saw the Torah as authoritative, and he had John say to the emir, “you accept Moses and his books.” Nevertheless, the text claimed that they did not recognize the entire Old Testament as canonical, and at one point the narrator interjected, “And the glorious emir did not accept these things from the prophets but wanted it to be shown to him [from] Moses. (p. 71)
Bēt Ḥālē Disputation (c. 720s)
The Bēt Ḥālē Disputation distinguished the outward differences between conquerors and conquered, especially in terms of religious practice. Nevertheless, at a deeper level it elided these distinctions. Such elision was partially reflected in the author’s choice of terms. The text called the notable a ṭayyāyā, a Son of Hagar, or a Son of Ishmael—all terms that Syriac authors could also apply to Christians. The text avoided Hagarene, which was reserved only for Muslims. Religious difference was further reduced by what the narrator said about the relationship between Christian beliefs and those of Hagar’s descendants. In response to the ṭayyāyā’s question, “Tell me the truth, how is our prophet Muḥammad regarded in your eyes?” the monk first replied that Muḥammad had proclaimed “the one true God.” When pressed, the monk went on to state that Muḥammad even believed in the Trinity. Nevertheless, aware of the ṭayyāyē’s propensity toward idolatry, Muḥammad did not teach them all of the doctrines he had learned from a Christian monk named Bahira. The text implied that if the Sons of Hagar truly knew what their prophet had known, they, too, would be Christian. (p. 73)
Muslims As the New Jews
This was not the only letter in which Timothy [r. 780-823] made this analogy. In Letter 24 he asked Sergius to send him a document against “the new belief of the new Jews.” In Letter 36 Timothy wrote about a broadly “Jewish belief” and debated against a series of adversaries who “denigrate Christ,” including Manichaeans, Arians, Marcionites, Jews, and an unnamed group of “opponents” who were clearly Muslim. This list pointed toward the internal logic for Timothy’s characterization of Muslims as “new Jews.” Syriac Christianity already had a long history of calling one’s theological opponents Jews, a polemic that previous generations of Christians most often applied against other Christians whom they regarded as heretical. (p. 82-83)
For Timothy, Muslims’ rejection of Jesus’ divinity, incarnation, death, and resurrection made them Jew-like. (p. 83)
Syriac Christians also often depicted Islam as a form of Judaism and in some cases even called Muslims the “new Jews.”111 As a result, Dionysius’s phrase “Jewish custom” carried a double entendre associating circumcision not only with literal Jews but also with Muslims. (p. 166)
Caliph al-Mutwakkil (r. 847-861)
Two years after Dionysius’s death in 845, Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–861) came to power. Under al-Mutawakkil, Christian involvement in the translation movement continued, and the caliph even had a Christian chief physician, but he ended the tradition of open religious debates, enacted a series of anti-Christian measures, and imprisoned many Christians. It may also have been under al-Mutawakkil’s reign that a set of traditions concerning non-Muslim communities more fully consolidated into the so-called Pact of cUmar. It remains unclear to what degree the Pact of cUmar reflected actual practices. Nevertheless, at least in theory, the eventually canonical form of the Pact established sumptuary laws to distinguish non-Muslims from Muslims, forbade new church construction, and regulated public displays of Christian worship. (p.94)
9th Century Views
Ninth-century Christians encountered Islam as a much more fully formed and religiously defined entity than it had been in previous generations. Nevertheless, even for mid-ninth-century Syriac writers, the conceptual boundaries of Christianity and Islam remained extremely porous. (p.98)
Taking their cue from postcolonial studies, many recent scholars have explored how groups use the category of religion to create and reinforce power hierarchies. For example, Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions argues that, prior to the nineteenth century, “there was no ‘Buddhism’ to consolidate disparate observations gathered in and about Asia. . . . Buddhism as such came to life, perhaps for the first time, in a European philological workshop.” Recent scholarship on the religions of South Asia has also investigated the emergence of the category of Hinduism as a means to unite a diverse set of practices and beliefs under a single name. This research often explores the relationship between British colonial practices and the coinage of the term Hinduism. Some scholars have also examined how groups that others label as a religion appropriate this category in their own struggles to resist oppressive practices or promote a nationalist agenda. The point of such research is not to deny that there are people, now called Buddhists, who follow a broadly similar set of beliefs and practices, now called Buddhism. Nor is the point to adjudicate whether Hinduism is or is not a religion. Instead, such work reveals that many well-known and widely accepted categories into which we commonly group people, beliefs, and practices are of relatively recent vintage. This realization leads to questioning why these particular classifications were created, what was at stake in their establishment, and what they can tell us about the period during which they first arose. (p. 98-99)
As the first Christians to encounter Muslims, Syriac authors were at the forefront of non-Muslim constructions of Islam, an increasingly dominant entity whose own identity claims were frequently tied to discourses of religious distinction and supersessionism. (p. 99)
Muhammad Didn’t Perform Any Miracles (c. 724)
But unlike the Syriac translator of the Chronicle ad 724, Timothy did not unquestionably adopt Muslim views of Muḥammad, and he remained uncompromising on one crucial issue. However much Muḥammad may have “walked on the path of the prophets,” Timothy was darn sure that Muḥammad was not himself a prophet. Throughout his dialogue, Timothy returned to this topic, presenting arguments centered around two main points: Muḥammad could not be a prophet because (1) he never performed any miracles, and (2) scripture never foretold his coming. By Timothy’s day, Muslim scholars had already extensively debated the question of Muḥammad’s performance of miracles. In their exegesis of Qur’an 6:109, which instructed Muḥammad not to perform any signs because these came only from God, Muslim scholars quickly developed a tradition that Muḥammad’s only miracle was the icjāz al-Qur’ān (inimitability of the Qur’an). Nevertheless, the emerging sīra (biographical) tradition began to attribute other miracles to Muḥammad as well. In Timothy’s Apology, however, the caliph used neither of these traditions to refute Timothy’s claim regarding Muḥammad’s lack of miracles. Timothy and the caliph did, however, actively contest whether the Bible ever referred to Muḥammad. Central to their debate was the Muslim doctrine of taḥrīf (tampering). In several places the Qur’an speaks of the “people of the book” tampering with Scripture. Although the Qur’an remained ambiguous about what this tampering actually consisted of, later Muslim theologians more explicitly charged Jews and Christians with directly changing sacred texts. They often argued that as part of this process of scriptural corruption, Jews and Christians removed biblical prophecies that originally referred to Muḥammad. In Timothy’s Apology, al-Mahdi explicitly told Timothy, “There were many testimonies [about Muḥammad] but the scriptures were corrupted by you and you removed them.” In response, Timothy listed several objections to charges of taḥrīf ranging from outright denials (e.g., no Christian would dare) to rather innovative reasoning (e.g., Christians’ and Jews’ hatred for each other would prevent them from making the same changes to the biblical text). As with the issue of Muḥammad and miracles, al-Mahdi remained surprisingly silent and simply accepted Timothy’s defense of the Bible’s integrity. (p. 109)
Syriac vs. Byzantine and Latin Portrayals of Muhammad and Islam
Unlike the Greek writings of John of Damascus, Syriac texts never portrayed Muḥammad as the harbinger of the Antichrist or spoke of him as “blasphemous and obscene,” as did Constantine Prophyrogenitus.42 Nor was he an impure enemy of God taught and possessed by demons or a stupid man writing with a perverse pen who loved debauchery, massacres, pillage, and blasphemy, as depicted by the Byzantine writers Nicetas of Byzantium and George the Monk.43 Nor was he an idol-worshiping slave to sin who made his own religion by combing the errors of Jews, Arians, and Nestorians.44 In Syriac sources, Muḥammad did not receive his teaching from a demon in the form of a vulture, as reported in the Istoria de Mahamed, or from a wicked angel, as in the Latin writings of Eulogius. (p. 113)
Some Syriac Christians Thought the Quran Was Crypto-Christian
It is as if Syriac authors took the Qur’anic depiction of Christians as “people of the book” at its most literal to argue that Christians were people of the book. From this perspective, either the Qur’an was not legitimate Scripture or it also belonged to Christianity. (p. 115)
When Timothy spoke of Muḥammad, he did not, however, limit his scriptural exegesis to the Bible. The catholicos also provided a Christian interpretation of the Qur’an. Timothy argued that the Qur’an’s use of the first-person plural for God and the appearance of untranslatable letters preceding several Qur’an suras (chapters) proved that Muḥammad knew of the Trinity: (p. 110)
He openly taught about one God. But as for the Trinity, he professed it with symbols and with signs by (expressions) such as “His word,” and “His spirit,” and “We have sent our spirit,” and “We have formed a completed man.” And thus he did not teach openly about (the Trinity) lest they be scandalized by it as by polytheism. But also he did not completely hide it lest he stray from the way of Moses and of Isaiah and of all the prophets. But he professed (the Trinity) with symbols, with the three letters at the beginning of the suras. (p. 110)
Umayyad Caliph Hisham (r. 724-743)
In the early eighth century, the Umayyad caliph Hishām (r. 724–743) decided to reside in Rusafa. While there, he funded a new Umayyad mosque. The site Hishām chose for his mosque was a surprising one. He built it (quite literally) on unstable ground. Despite the presence of several sinkholes that had already damaged the surrounding buildings, he constructed the mosque immediately north of Basilica A. Clearly, the caliph’s overarching concern was not geological. Instead, his aim was to situate the mosque within a few dozen meters of Sergius’s relics. Even more surprising, Hishām built a door in the mosque’s qibla wall (the wall facing Mecca) that opened directly into the church courtyard. This architectural innovation resulted in Christians and Muslims sharing a common hall. It also provided Muslim worshippers quicker access to Sergius’s shrine.
Marriage
As with much canonical literature, it may also be useful to read these canons backward. That is, their prohibition of intermarriage suggested that it was a sufficiently frequent phenomenon to attract the attention of a late eighth-century council. It is also noteworthy that the canons spoke only of women intermarrying, implying that the underlying concern was conversion. The council assumed that a woman was more likely to take on the religious practices of her husband than the other way around. Contemporary East Syrian legal sources presented a similar picture, although they more often spoke of Christians generally marrying nonbelievers, as opposed to specifying the partners as being Hagarenes. Isho’bokht (ca. 770) stated that a Christian man could not marry a non-Christian woman, nor a Christian woman a non-Christian man. In 805 Timothy I ruled differently depending on the gender of the Christian. He did not allow a Christian woman to marry a non-Christian lest she and her children become non-Christian. A Christian man, on the other hand, could marry a non-Christian woman if he had reason to believe she would subsequently convert to Christianity. Soon afterward, Isho’barnun (d. 824) made similar decisions. A Christian woman who willingly married “a ḥanpē, a Jew, or a man of another religion” was to be expelled from the church, along with her parents. A Christian man, however, was to be expelled only if he allowed his non-Christian wife to keep her religion. Both Isho’bokht and Isho’barnun also spoke of a spouse’s apostasy as acceptable grounds for divorce. (p.153)
Inheretence
Of related concern to intermarriage was the question of interfaith inheritance. For example, Timothy I was asked what should be done if a Christian bequeathed his estate to a Muslim. He responded that if other God-fearing Christians were nearby, the bequest should not be honored. However, if there were no good Christians in the area, the church should consider inheritance by a Muslim to be legitimate. In contrast, Isho’bokht declared that only Christians could inherit from other Christians. Non-Christian children could not inherit from Christian parents, nor could a non-Christian woman inherit from a Christian husband unless she converted to Christianity. A century later, Gabriel of Basra repeated Isho’bokht’s ruling in his own canon collection.
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