The history of the early medieval Middle East is commonly understood to be synonymous with the history of medieval Muslims. This situation is the result of the privileging of Arabic Muslim sources, which focus on the concerns of Muslims, oftentimes neglecting the voices and memory of other religious and social groups. Muslim leaders and communities, however lived alongside large non-Muslim populations that occupied the Middle East prior to the conquests, and continued to flourish under Islamic rule. Compartmentalizing Islamic history from the history of other communities has many deleterious effects, including the tacit construction of boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims that may not reflect historical reality.
This interdisciplinary panel draws on a variety of historical, literary, legal, and material sources to explore narratives of non-Muslim and underrepresented groups in Syria and Iraq in the 7th-9th century. Inspired by the work of Michael Morony and most recently Jack Tannous, the panel has three goals: a) to incorporate non-Muslim perspectives into the cultural history of the medieval Middle East, b) to examine terms of categorization used in Muslim and non-Muslim sources and c) to complicate the Muslim-non-Muslim divisions by exploring other categories such as race, social status, and urban-rural divides.
The first paper examines various Syriac legal responses to conversion from the 7th to the 9th centuries, especially the ways in which Christian figures responded to Christians who converted to Islam, then reverted to Christianity, and the interrelated issue of how those same Christian figures categorized Muslims from a legal perspective. The second paper contextualizes Muslim historical and biobibliographical sources within the Christian topography of Iraq, and argues that Wasit, the city that al-Hajjaj b. Yusuf built for himself, was a cultural proclamation of his power targeted both at Muslim and non-Muslim populations of Iraq. The third paper explores the category of zandaqa in literary sources such as al-Jahiz to argue that the eighth- and ninth-century literary conception of zandaqa conflated heresy and race and was crafted in opposition to those deemed insufficiently assimilated to the era’s conceptions of Arabness and Muslimness. The fourth paper studies Byzantine, Sasanian, and Islamic historiographical sources, alongside rabbinic texts and response and material evidence, to elucidate the spread of the influence of Babylonian rabbis between the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. It argues that the rabbis became widely recognized as a result of concrete social and economic shifts in the 6th through 8th centuries, including urbanization, migration, and changing political contexts.
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Al-Hajjaj (d. 714), the governor of Iraq and the Islamic East, founded his residential city Wasit in a swamp. The air was so hot in this region that birds would fall dead, and people lived shortened lives. Furthermore, the land was heavily populated by the anbat, the peasant Aramaic populations who slowly penetrated the new city despite al-Hajjaj’s attempt to ban them. The governor decided to build Wasit because of internal discord between his Syrian and Iraqi troops and chose its location because it was a central point between Basra and Kufa. Or, because a Christian monk predicted that a prosperous city be built there. These are, in brief, the Muslim accounts of the foundation of Wasit—all generally underwhelmed with its location and ascribing its foundation to internal Arab-Muslim concerns. Although Ibn Khaldun considered Wasit to have been the capital of the empire under al-Hajjaj and although the city prospered for several hundreds of years, it did not become the magnet of Islamic imagination like Baghdad and, perhaps as a consequence, it has not enjoyed much scholarly attention. (Monher Sakly’s article in EI2 remains the most important source.) Reexamining and rectifying its representation in Muslim historiography, this paper presents the foundation of Wasit as a masterful cultural strategy of al-Hajjaj targeted both at Muslims and the non-Muslim populations of Iraq.
The paper argues that that the new city was selected not merely due to its strategic distance from Basra and Kufa, as Muslim sources would have it. Far from an insignificant swamp, Wasit was founded at the site of the ancient city of Kashkar, a major center of Christian learning for centuries, and therefore was imbued with great symbolic significance for the Christian population of Iraq. An examination of the biographical dictionary Tarikh Wasit by Aslam b. Sahl Bahshal (d. 905) will help assess to what extent al-Hajjaj’s (reported) ban against non-Muslims in the city was observed in practice. And finally, non-Muslim sources provide the Christian perspective on the event.
After proposing an alternative historical narrative for the foundation of Wasit than that presented in historiographic accounts, the paper investigates the historiographic accounts themselves. It argues that despite the fact that the memory of Christians was eclipsed from the city’s foundation narrative, certain literary motifs and their persuasive strategies reveal a shared Muslim-Christian audience. The paper therefore offers novel approaches to both the history and historiography of the foundation of Wasit.
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Dr. Jessica Mutter
Syriac Christian legal responses to Islam changed significantly over the first two hundred years of Muslim rule. In this paper, I will focus first on how Christian leaders responded to
Christians who converted to Islam, then sought to return to Christianity, and second, how these leaders categorized Muslims from a legal perspective.
Converts from Islam to Christianity emerge as early as the late seventh century C.E. Christian leaders responded to these cases in a variety of ways. A trend from leniency to strictness emerges over the course of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, as conversion to Islam became more common and more devastating to Syriac Christian communities. Jacob of Edessa (d. 708 C.E.) was a prominent example of this early leniency toward Christians who converted Islam. He allowed deathbed conversions from Islam to Christianity and permitted those who did so to receive communion. Those who recovered from illness were required to do penance for having converted to Islam, but after completion of their penance were again allowed to receive communion. By the ninth century C.E., in contrast, converts to Christianity from Islam were required to reject Muhammad by name, along with the Qur’an, various Islamic teachings, the family and associates of the Prophet, and even Mecca and the ‘God of Muhammad.’ Adults who had chosen to convert away and revert back were let into the church, but were not allowed to receive communion again until the end of their lives.
Syriac Christians referred to Muslims by a variety of terms in the seventh century (hanpe, mhaggre, tayyaye, etc.) but the term hanpe is particularly common in legal writing. The use of hanpe to describe Muslims continued in Syriac legal texts into the eighth century, even once other Syriac terms referring to Muslims became more common in other genres. I argue continued use of the term hanpe in legal contexts to refer to Muslims designated a legal status for Muslims as a religious ‘other’ – a status that defined and controlled how Syriac Christians could interact with hanpe (including both pagans and Muslims), what was required of people converting to Syriac Christianity from Islam or paganism, and other regulations.
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Dr. Michael Payne
In my paper, I argue that the conflation of heresy and racial difference in 8th-9th century Iraq affected the usage of the category of zandaqa. As Georges Vajda noted, the meaning of zandaqa is ambiguous. This ambiguity has been compounded by the transformation of zandaqa over time: the Manichaeans of Kerdir’s inscription in the 3rd century are not the same as the clandestine apostates of al-Ghazali’s Faysal al-Tafriqa in the 12th century. Even if we focus on a narrower span of time, the term zindiq could be applied to a confusing array of people. Melhem Chokr argued that, in the early ‘Abbasid period, most zanadiqa were either dualists, eternalists, or libertines. These qualities do not describe an actual coherent group of people. An intersectional approach to difference, however, makes this heresiological category more comprehensible. Instead of trying to link these disparate characteristics into a single social grouping, we should follow the heresiological gaze back to its source: Arab (or Arabized), Muslim, social elites. Averil Cameron suggested that the process of labelling certain groups as heretics tells us more about the values of heresiologists than it tells us about supposed heretics. With this in mind, in my paper, I will be focusing on how al-Jahiz used zandaqa across his corpus (in Kitab al-Hayawan, Kitab al-Bayan, and his epistles). In his work, al-Jahiz articulated a vision of normative behavior in which Arabness and Muslimness were coterminous. Zandaqa was the foil to his conception of proper piety. I further argue that al-Jahiz (and other elite intellectuals like Ibn Qutayba) were part of a conservative reaction to the disruptive effects of the ‘Abbasid imperial project. To contextualize their reactionary politics, I will draw upon texts written by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, al-Tabari, and Abu Faraj al-Isfahani. Against this backdrop, I argue that al-Jahiz’s conception of zandaqa was crafted in opposition to those who he deemed to not have assimilated to his conceptions of Arabness and Muslimness: specifically, people of Aramaean and Iranian descent whose purported cosmologies and practices were abhorrent to him.
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Simcha Gross
The spread of Babylonian rabbinic influence between the Sasanian and early Islamic period remains poorly understood. Though a minor movement of seemingly little influence at the outset of the Sasanian period, by the 10th century the Babylonian rabbis commanded respect from Jewish communities from Andalusia to Khorasan. This paper reexamines this transition by highlighting the ways in which broader historical trends of the late Sasanian and early Islamic Empire - including economy, postal services, urbanization, migration patterns, trade routes, and more - facilitated the growth and spread of Babylonian rabbinic influence.
The elusive nature of this period is a product of our limited source material. As a result, scholars have either retrojected the influence of Babylonian rabbis in the 10th century on the Sasanian period itself, or despaired of providing any account due to the lack of evidence. This paper argues that there remains untapped evidence for Jewish life in this period, and that a structural methodology that situates Babylonian Jewish life within the broader historical trends of the time reveals new light on this crucial transition period.
An examination of all of the available evidence for Babylonian Jews between the 6th-9th century - including Babylonian Jewish incantation bowls, Byzantine and Arabic historiographical sources, and the earliest responsa produced by Babylonian rabbis in the mid to late 8th century - reveals the rise in local recognition of Babylonian rabbis as a result of the major social and economic shifts of the Sasanian sixth and seventh century, to the expansion of their influence in the 8th century and onwards. Key transitions following the conquests facilitated the further spread of rabbinic influence. The well-known trend towards urbanization - mentioned in an early responsum - relocated rabbinic supporters to major cities, while compelling rabbis to spread their network to maintain - or increase - their financial resources. The related trend of migration, and the development of trade networks across the Arab-Muslim world, created satellite Babylonian communities in both the east and west. The major bailiwick of Babylonian rabbis, however, according to a number of sources, appears to have been Jewish communities in Iran, a fact occasionally acknowledged but rarely integrated as central components in the spread of rabbinic influence.
By triangulating our available evidence for Babylonian Jewish life and our knowledge of broader structural developments of the time, this paper offers a new picture of this momentous period of transition.
