Jack Tannous - The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

The Making of the
Medieval Middle East

RELIGION, SOCIETY, AND SIMPLE BELIEVERS

Jack Tannous

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton & Oxford

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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ISBN 978-0-691-17909-4

eISBN 978-0-691-18416-6 (ebook)

Version 1.1

LCCN 2018939251

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden

Text Design: Leslie Flis

Jacket Design: Leslie Flis

Jacket art: Twelfth-century illumination from a manuscript of The Heavenly
Ladder by St. John Klimakos (Sinai Greek 418). By permission of
Saint Catherines Monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt

Production: Jacquie Poirier

Publicity: Kathryn Stevens

Copyeditor: Eva Jaunzems

In memory of Jamileh Tannous

xi

xiii

Map 1. The Middle East

Map 2. The Core Regions of Syriac Christianity

The origins of this book lie in two questions that have engaged me for a very long time. The first is a persistent and longstanding curiosity I have had about what it would have meant in the late Roman and medieval worlds for people with little or no education to belong to a church whose identity was articulated in part through councils that created definitions and creeds which deployed sophisticated theological concepts.

The second question rises from a sense of puzzlement I first started having as an undergraduate at the University of Texas around the end of the last century. It was there that I began to be intrigued by a very simple, yet profoundly consequential, transformation: how did the Middle East go from being the birthplace of Christianity and eventually a largely Christian region, to being one where Christianity was a minority religion, if it had any presence at all?

Like all abiding interests, these questions had a personal connection: my grandfather, born in Mandatory Palestine, left school in the fourth grade to help support his family, in which there were eleven children. I never met himhe died before I was bornbut I have been told he could read, though not a great deal. One of my great uncles told me that he once had an argument with my grandfather about whether the world was flat. My grandfather believed that it was (if it were round, he argued, all the water would fall off).

These two questions ran parallel in my mind for years, but I gradually recognized that the second could not be properly addressed without considering the first. When thinking about questions of de-Christianization, apostasy, conversion, and Islamization, I came to realize that I had implicitly assumed, as did most of the scholarly literature I was reading, that medieval Christians and Muslims were uniformly learned, like the churchmen and ulm whose literary remains have formed the subject of historical and theological study in Western universities for centuries. But what would it mean for these questions if most Christians had no formal education, theological or otherwise? What if the erudite churchmen and Muslim religious authorities that scholars have traditionally studied were the exception, not the rule? It was a simple and obvious point, but its implications for how we understood confessional belonging and religious change in the Middle East were potentially vast.

The book that follows represents an attempt to deal with a number of related historical problems, but it is these two persistent questionsthe nature and significance of nonelite Christianity and the mechanics and pace of de-Christianization/Islamizationthat are at its root. So, too, is a desire to understand the place that Christian communities have in the Middle East, both medieval and contemporary.

In the years since I first began to think about these issues, the Second Iraq War, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise of the Islamic State, among other things, have combined to devastate much of the Middle Easts Christian population, with communities in Syria and Iraq undergoing the second Middle Eastern Christian genocide in a century and Christians in Egypt regularly experiencing horrific acts of violence. The question of Christian-Muslim relations, another fundamental concern of this book, will not cease to be an important one in our lifetimes or those of our children and grandchildren. As this project has drawn to a close, however, this violence and the immigration it fuels have made increasingly likely the possibility that Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East, the very place where these contacts first began, may become a concern only for students of the past, and not for those living in the present. And although I study the past, I live in the present. It has given me great sadness therefore to realize that we stand before a rich world that is on the verge of being lost.

Princeton, New Jersey
All Saints Day, 2017

This book is about the world the Arabs encountered when they conquered the Middle East in the mid-seventh century and the world those conquests created. The importance of the Arab conquests for the history of the Middle East and, indeed, for the history of the subsequent fourteen hundred years, needs no emphasis. Apart from the rise and triumph of Christianity, no other event in the first millennium rivals them in significance. A majority of the population of the world today is affected in profound ways, daily, by these two events.

For all its importance, however, this period has been remarkably resistant to the writing of a compelling and persuasive unified account that does equal justice to the religious landscape of the region and to its changes under both Roman and Arab rule. On the Roman side, one easily gets lost in a thicket of ecclesiastical labels and rarefied Greek theological terms. The fact that these terms, when rendered into Syriaca dialect of Aramaic that served as the literary language for much of the Middle Easts Christian population at this timemight mean different things to different Christian confessions does not help matters, nor does the fact that many of the labels used to refer to various groups can be regarded as offensive. It is a period rich in historical importance but also abounding in opportunities for perplexity.

The appearance of Muslims on the scene adds another layer of potential confusion. The emergence of Islam along with its controversies and civil wars brings with it befuddling Arabic names, competing precedence claims, and tribal genealogical assertions and relations that seem, to the uninitiated, as arcane as they are apparently consequential. The Islamic tradition has left us remarkably detailedeven at times awkwardly intimateinformation about the Prophet Muammad, and yet accounts of early Islamic history have frequently been mired in interminable and intractable debates about how much, if anything, we can believe of the traditional Muslim account of Islamic origins. More significant than this or that report about the Prophets behavior or activities are the bigger questions that haunt the field: Did the Qurn actually originate in Muammads lifetime, in Western Arabia? Can we even speak of Islam as a phenomenon before the late seventh century?