Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (45 page)

ISLAM AND THE EAST

In the Middle East and around the African shore of the Mediterranean most Christians would now have to live with a new reality: they had lost their position at the centre of society. The new situation was at its most extreme in Arabia itself, where Muslims put into practice what was said to have been one of Muhammad's deathbed commands and set about eliminating Christianity from the peninsula. After a century or so, there were only a few Christian communities left. In a symbolic annexation which echoes similar architectural appropriations by Christians from predecessor sacred buildings, the eighth-century Great Mosque in Sana'a in the Yemen incorporates columns from the demolished cathedral built there two centuries before by the Miaphysite ruler Abraha (see pp. 244-5). It may be the result of a policy of thorough Islamic destruction that no trace remains of a Bible in Arabic which can be dated to the era of flourishing Christianity before the coming of Islam; on the other hand, given the Syriac character of the Arabian Churches before, maybe it had never existed.
¹³

Elsewhere, there was no such extreme policy of suppression, and in fact in most of the societies newly dominated by Islam two or more centuries passed before there was anything like a Muslim majority. Although to begin with there was no effort to fill the cities with Muslim converts, wherever a church or cathedral was a prominent central building, it was likely to become the main mosque. It was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over.
¹⁴
Someone would have to do practical deals with the conquerors. In default of action from the shattered secular authorities, a number of Christian bishops followed the example of Sophronios's surrender to Caliph Umar I in Jerusalem and negotiated permanent settlements. Regardless of the era in which they were actually concluded, conventionally these came to be known collectively as the Pact or Covenant (
dhimma
) of Umar; this referred to a second caliph called Umar (reigned 717-20), though the attribution may have been retrospective. The Pact had its precedent already in the Sassanian Empire. Christians and Jews as People of the Book (and later, by extensions of dubious logic but practical utility, other significant religious minorities) were organized into separate communities or
millets
, defined by their common practice of the same religion, which was guaranteed as protected as long as it was primarily practised in private. They were given a specified tax burden and their second-class status was defined as that of a
dhimmi
(a non-Muslim protected under a
dhimma
).

The conquerors thus remained a military and governing elite, aloof from their conquered populations, having to concentrate their scattered forces through their huge new dominions in garrisons. They were a good deal less interested in Christian beliefs than the Christians were in them. Christians learned about Islam, not always with great accuracy, in order to denounce it and justify themselves against it. Significantly, the terms in which they denounced the new prophecy were similar to the insults which they directed towards other Christians who disagreed with them and whom they styled heretics. This is not how they talked about Zoroastrianism, or the defeated cults of the old Roman Empire.
¹⁵
Whether Christians found themselves oppressed in the new situation depended on the personality and outlook of the Muslim authorities. At various times discrimination was deliberately burdensome: so under a number of governors and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, who were the first conquerors and who ruled from Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians faced the destruction of churches and the strict enforcement of a host of petty humiliations and restrictions, while under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847-61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow - an anticipation of a measure which, in later centuries, Christian societies would take against their Jewish minorities in Europe.
¹⁶

At other times under rulers of wider sympathies, second-class status might mean as much privilege and flexibility as it had done under the Sassanians. Some of the Umayyads found themselves charmed by the cultures which they had conquered, so that archaeologists in Palestine and Syria have revealed an astonishing flourishing of Christian-style figural art under their rule. Even in Umayyad palaces the mosaic floors may luxuriate in satyrs and cupids, and, contrary to any picture of consistent destruction, there was an outburst of church-building complete with rich figural mosaics datable to after the Arab invasions.
¹⁷
One Dyophysite bishop wrote in 649, soon after the Muslim conquest, that 'these Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and Saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries'.
¹⁸

Monasteries were nevertheless going to have a hard time surviving in this new world, particularly in the cities, and in the long term the more remote monasteries stood the best chance of survival. Muslims were torn between the general cultural respect for ascetic holy men in the Middle East, attested in the Qur'an itself, and other pronouncements of the Qur'an which condemn monks as dangerous charlatans.
¹⁹
One device for protection against negative opinions was to create stories which provided a comfortingly warm picture of relationships between monks and the Prophet. This was possible because around the text of the Qur'an there grew a great range of traditional stories (known as a
hadith
) which deal with matters on which the Qur'an is not sufficiently explict. So it was supposed to have been a Miaphysite monk, Bahira, who recognized Muhammad's special destiny in his youth, long before he had received any revelations.
²⁰
One famous monastery below Mount Sinai refounded by Justinian and later dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria reinforced the security created by its isolation and inaccessibility by adroitly injecting into Islamic tradition a
hadith
that Muhammad himself had granted protection to the community - this was duly backed up by a document in the monastery archives of St Catherine, autographed with the Prophet's own hand (literally, a picture of his hand).
²¹
In the era of the tolerant Egyptian Islamic dynasty of the Fatimids, St Catherine's showed further prudence by actually constructing a mosque within its precincts, which still exists complete with minaret, although it is sealed up and is in any case not properly oriented towards Mecca, as a mosque should be.

One of the most influential theologians for Byzantine Orthodoxy in the years around 700 (see pp. 447-8) spent all his life as a subject of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and he was indeed ethnically an Arab, as his family name, Mansur, revealed; he has come to be known as John of Damascus. John enjoyed the privileges of a traditional elite which had made a smooth transition from the old regime to the new: his grandfather, Mansur ibn Sargun, a Chalcedonian Christian, had been the last governor of the city on behalf of the Byzantine emperor, while John's father was a high-ranking official in Umayyad administration. John grew up alongside the future Caliph Al-Yazid, and assumed the hereditary family place in public office as chief councillor, though later in life, after political disgrace, he withdrew into the celebrated monastery of St Sabas near Jerusalem. His intimacy with the elite of the new dispensation did not prevent him from writing combatively against Islam and even calling it 'forerunner of the Antichrist'.
²²

Chalcedonian Orthodoxy like John's was obviously going to be at a long-term disadvantage once the protection of the Byzantine armies had been removed. Jerusalem and its shrine of the Holy Sepulchre remained one stronghold of Melchite Orthodoxy amid the Miaphysite and Dyophysite majority. It would not be too cynical to suggest that this was understandable, given the continuing flow of Chalcedonian pilgrims into Palestine from the empire and even further west; they would not appreciate being received at the holy places of Bethlehem and Jerusalem by Christians whom they regarded as heretics. The same applied to the great monastery in Sinai, hugely popular in the Byzantine world despite the difficulty of getting there, long before St Catherine's bones were found on Mount Sinai above it. The Burning Bush flourishing within its walls, said to be the same in which God had appeared to Moses (see p. 54), recalled the Virgin who had likewise in Chalcedonian eyes sheltered the Godhead, and the monastery always remained loyal to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, looking to the Melchite patriarch in Jerusalem rather than the Miaphysite Copts to its west.

Elsewhere, neither Miaphysites nor Dyophysites had much reason to look back with regret on the disappearance of the imperial power and its Church. When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750, they moved the centre of government in the caliphate into Mesopotamia, where from 762 they designed a new capital with no links to previous imperial histories. Baghdad replaced both Damascus and Seleucia-Ctesiphon as the key city of the Middle East. In the battle for prominence among the various factions of Christianity, that shift eastwards would inevitably favour the Dyophysite 'Church of the East' against the Melchites and Miaphysites, and the Abbasids gave an unprecedented official jurisdiction to the Dyophysite patriarch over all Christians in their caliphate, which stretched from Egypt into Central Asia.

This was not an unmixed blessing. The political importance of the patriarchate meant that caliphs took a personal and official interest in the election of new patriarchs, who had no choice but to live in the capital. Just as under the Sassanians, a succession of Dyophysite Christians became Court physicians to Muslim caliphs, and equally that was not necessarily beneficial in its consequences: Christian physicians might be more interested in using the patriarchate for their own purposes than in securing the more general interests of the Church. Yet the value which the Abbasid caliphs placed on the medical services of the Christian physicians was a major reason why Baghdad became the setting for a new institution of higher learning which, from its foundation in 832, came to outshine the schools of Nisibis and Gondeshapur. Christians particularly dominated its specializations in astronomy and medicine. The Abbasid caliphate was interested in drawing on all the resources of pre-Islamic learning that might be useful to it, and the chief source of this was the literature preserved by the Church of the East, translations from Greek into Syriac.

7. The Middle East after the Abbasid conquest

Now an industry of retranslation began, this time into Arabic: the structured analysis and science of Aristotle, the dialogues of Plato, the medical texts of Galen and the followers of Hippocrates, the geography and cosmology of Ptolemy were only the star items on the library shelves. Most famous of these translators was the ninth-century Christian Court physician Hunayn ibn 'Ishaq, director of the caliphate's library and nicknamed 'prince of translators'. It was these texts, translated yet again into Latin, which were the source of the reimport of swathes of lost Classical knowledge into Latin Europe in later centuries. Among so much else turned into Arabic, the charming tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, which had started life as the story of the Buddha, passed westwards through this factory of translation (see pp. 231-2).
²³
The scale of this feverish acquisition of knowledge, the huge size of Islamic libraries compared with collections in the Christian West and the general sophistication of Abbasid administration were such that, from the eighth century, the mass of texts encouraged a new copying technology imported from China along the trade routes which the Eastern Christians dominated: instead of papyrus or expensive parchment, cloth rags were transformed into paper, durable and comparatively easy to make and cheap as a writing material to cope with the demand.
²⁴

The late eighth and early ninth centuries were promising times for the Church of the East, aided by the fact that through forty years from the 780s its patriarch, Timothy I, was an outstanding diplomat in his dealings with caliphs who continued to be erratic in their attitude to the Church. It has been suggested that in his time around a quarter of all the world's Christians saw Timothy as their spiritual leader - probably as many as looked to the then pope in the decaying city of Rome, far away in the West.
²⁵
The Patriarch's Church increasingly looked east beyond the Abbasid borders. The vigour of Church life combined with the increasing awareness of the Dyophysite bishops that they had less and less room for manoeuvre within the caliphate: conversions from Islam were forbidden and other potential converts who were not People of the Book were diminishing in numbers, so the Church would have to look elsewhere to spread its message. Patriarch Timothy is known to have consecrated a bishop for Tibet, at a time when its Buddhist identity was still in flux, and he could look much further east than that, to the Christian Church which had flourished there for more than a century.
²⁶