Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World

300 Pages·2015·3.48 MB·English

by  Michael Philip Penn

Envisioning Islam
DIvInatIons: REREaDIng LatE ancIEnt RELIgIon
series Editors: Daniel Boyarin, virginia Burrus, Derek Krueger
a complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
EnvIsIonIng IsLam
syriac christians and the Early muslim World
michael Philip Penn
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

all rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.

Published by
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Library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data
IsBn 978-0-8122-4722-0
contents
Introduction 1
chapter 1. When good things Happened
to other People: syriac memories of the Islamic conquests 15
chapter 2. a Different type of Difference-making: syriac
narratives of Religious Identity 53
chapter 3. Using muslims to think With: narratives
of Islamic Rulers 102
chapter 4. Blurring Boundaries: the continuum
Between Early christianity and Early Islam 142
conclusion 183
notes 187
Bibliography 251
Index 279
acknowledgments 293
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Acknowledgments
In August 2001, I began a Kraft- Hiatt fellowship at Brandeis University. At
that point I had become quite concerned with how reductionist were most
modern images of Christian- Muslim relations; time and again, almost 1,500
years of complex, multivalent interactions were reduced to a history of un-
mitigated animosity. In response, I wanted to explore whether writings from
a little- known branch of Christianity might change our perspective. Could
these ancient, neglected texts add greater nuance to how we envision the earli-
est encounters of what eventually became the world’s two largest religions?
A month later, my project became more pressing and much more com-
plicated. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, American views of
Islam grew increasingly uniform and increasingly hostile. Historians of antiq-
uity are unlikely to singlehandedly reverse this trend and instantly dissuade
best- selling authors and influential speakers from unequivocal denunciations
of Islam. But I do think historians can challenge the reigning view that
throughout time Christianity and Islam always and inevitably clash.
These changes in the early twenty- first- century political, religious, and
cultural landscape profoundly affected the shape of this book. What I had
originally thought would be a fairly straightforward, quick project no longer
was. Instead, it turned into a much longer but, to my great delight, much
more collaborative endeavor than I could have ever imagined. Almost a de-
cade and a half later, it seems that the import for this sort of project has not
lessened, though my ability to remember everyone who has contributed to
this work certainly has. So I apologize in advance that my list of intellectual
interlocutors and dear friends remains woefully incomplete.
One of the greatest boons to my research was the ability to do so much
of at collaborative research centers. I greatly appreciated the opportunity to
spend a year in residence at New York University’s Institute for the Study of
the Ancient World and two years at the National Humanities Center. Each
was a home away from home and provided a vibrant intellectual environment
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294 Acknowledgments
and truly fantastic library staff. In addition to these centers, several other
institutions were particularly generous in their financial support of my re-
search. These include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Ameri-
can Council for Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the
American Academy of Religion, the National Endowment for the Humani-
ties, the Wabash Center, Brandeis University, and Mount Holyoke College.
I also obtained valuable feedback on early chapter drafts from several
reading groups including Providence Patristics in Rhode Island, LARCENY
(Late Ancient Religion in Central New York), the CIA (Christianity in An-
tiquity) in North Carolina, and the Five College Religion Group in Western
Massachusetts.
I was particularly fortunate not to lose any friends when I supple-
mented this feedback with a shameless distribution of chapter drafts to
Rhonda Burnette- Bletsch, Denise Buell, Catherine Chin, Maria Doerfler,
Christiane Luckritz Marquis, Tina Shepherdson, and Stephen Shoemaker.
Mount Holyoke students in my “Early Christian- Muslim Relations” semi-
nars provided an additional two semesters worth of discussions on this topic
and directly reviewed much of the book manuscript. So too, several Mount
Holyoke undergraduates served as amazingly productive research assistants
for this project, including Gabrielle Lachtrup, Audrey Lehrer, Rani Mehta,
Bree Murphy, Holly Norwick, Caitlin Rajala, Betsy Reif, Julia Spector, and
Hannah Spiro. The editorial board of the Divinations series, especially Derek
Kreuger, provided great suggestions for how to further revise the manuscript,
as did two anonymous readers.
I also obtained invaluable assistance and mentorship on all things Syriac
from Gabriel Aydin, Chip Coakley, and Lucas Van Rompay. The writing
itself was vastly improved through the editorial assistance of Laura Poole,
founder of Archer Editorial Services, Karen Carroll at the National Humani-
ties Center, and Marian Rogers, the copyeditor for the University of Penn-
sylvania Press.
My research began during fellowship under the mentorship of Berna-
dette Brooten and Marc Brettler. Tara Fitzpatricks and Liz Penland’s expert
grant advice helped it flourish. Throughout, I received constant emotional
support from my parents, from a wonderful group of best friends, and from
my Doktormutter Liz Clark. I can’t thank them enough.
As the project grew, so too did my immediate family. It is thus to my
partner Sarah Willburn along with our twin daughters Tabitha Ann Penn and
Sasha Naomi Willburn that I dedicate this book.
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Introduction
John: If a village of heretics should return to the true faith, what
should one do with their mysteries?
Jacob: They should be sent to the adherents of their faith. For this
also happened to me. Once there were some Hagarenes who carried
off the Eucharist from Byzantine territory. And when they feared
their conscience and brought it to me, I sent it to adherents of the
Byzantine confession.
— Jacob of Edessa, Second Letter to John the Stylite
In the late seventh century, John the Stylite sent his friend Jacob, bishop
of Edessa, a series of inquiries ranging from when to consecrate holy oil to
whether one should fast after Pentecost. Complications arose, however, when
John asked what he should do with Eucharistic elements from a village that
had just renounced Byzantine theology. By this time, there already was a two-
hundred- year tradition of John and Jacob’s church seeing the Byzantine Eu-
charist as invalid. Because Jacob had acquired a reputation of being a stickler
for ecclesiastical boundaries, John probably thought his mentor would further
reify church divisions, declare the Byzantine Eucharistic elements profane,
and instruct him to simply throw them out. Jacob, however, confounded
these expectations. He instructed John to find some local Byzantine Chris-
tians and give them the villagers’ Eucharistic elements. But Jacob did not stop
with this unexpected answer. He followed it with an even more surprising
story relating his interactions with some Hagarenes.
The word “Hagarenes” was the most common term Jacob used to speak
of people whom we would call Muslims. The beginning of his anecdote thus
appears to support the most common modern understanding of Christian-
Muslim interactions, a relationship that twentieth- and twenty-fi rst- century
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2 Introduction
writers often characterize as a “clash of civilizations.” At first, Jacob shared a
story that seemed to be about Muslim raiders invading the Byzantine Empire
and pillaging Christian religious symbols to denigrate an opposing faith. But
again, Jacob confounded expectations. According to Jacob, these Hagarenes
eventually decided to return the Eucharistic elements to the local bishop,
a decision that cannot be easily explained through a clash- of- civilizations
model of interreligious encounter.
Unfortunately, Jacob’s account and dozens like it do not appear in modern
discussions of early Christian- Muslim relations, because they were written in
the “wrong” language. Because most modern scholars of early Christianity
have been trained primarily in Greek and Latin, most modern discussions
of early Christian depictions of Islam have concentrated on Greek and Latin
texts. 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 en-
countered 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. They wrote the
earliest and the most extensive accounts of Islam and described a compli-
cated set of religious and cultural exchanges that were not reducible to the
solely antagonistic. Nevertheless, because so few scholars read Syriac, there
has been relatively little analysis of these sources. As a result, most histori-
cal reconstructions of Christian-M uslim relations exclude from consideration
the largest corpus of early documents about Islam. Instead, studies most com-
monly focus on works whose martial context often reinforces an oppositional,
clash- of- civilizations model of interreligious encounter.
Greek and Latin texts were not unanimous in how they depicted Islam,
nor am I suggesting that they should be examined less. Nevertheless, because
of most historians’ linguistic training, there remains a notable bias as to which
sources scholars privilege when they investigate early Christian reactions to
Muslims. How might the history of Christianity’s relationship with Islam
change if, instead of relying on the writings of Christians who often met Mus-
lims on the battlefield, one focused on Syriac Christians like Jacob who had
more everyday contact with Muslims? I suggest that, by shifting these earliest
sources from the periphery to the center of analysis, historians can more accu-
rately envision the first interactions between Christianity and Islam.
Syriac texts such as Jacob’s not only present different images of Islam;
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