Christian Martyrs under Islam

Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World

Christian C. Sahner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780691203133, 9780691179100
• eBook ISBN: 9780691184180
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era

How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy.

Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire.

Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

Converting to Islam and Returning to Christianity

Let us begin this chapter with a story that illustrates how conversion is usually thought to have worked in the early Islamic period. The anecdote comes from the Chronicle of Zuqnīn, a historical work completed around 775 in a monastery near Āmid in northern Mesopotamia.¹ The author of the chronicle, a Syriac-speaking monk known as Joshua the Stylite, lamented the perceived uptick in conversions in his day. Burdened by heavy taxes and the harassment of the ʿAbbasid authorities, Christians were “turn[ing] to Islam [Syr. ḥanpūtā] faster than sheep rushing to water.” In packs of “twenty, thirty, one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred” at a time, they descended on the Muslim prefects in Ḥarrān, where they “renounced Christ, baptism, the Eucharist, and the Cross.” The desire to convert transcended social and economic classes. “This was done not only by the young,” the chronicler bemoaned, “but also by adults, the elderly … even by senior priests and so many deacons they cannot be counted.”² Although the Chronicle of Zuqnīn is a Christian eyewitness to the events of the early ʿAbbasid period, it reinforces an impression left by medieval Muslim sources, too. That is, the eighth century was a time of rapid religious change, but this change usually went in one direction: from the church to the mosque.

From a historical perspective, this impression is not entirely inaccurate. Sometime during or shortly after the Crusades, scholars surmise, the Middle East went from being a predominantly Christian world (with large numbers of Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and pagans) to one whose majority population practiced Islam.³ This was an uneven process, probably invisible to most who lived through it, and shaped by the vicissitudes of conquest and the varying fortunes of missionaries. It was also a process of remarkable regional diversity, for just as some areas crossed the threshold of a Muslim numerical majority early on, others held out for centuries, including parts of Upper Egypt, the mountains of Lebanon, and much of northern Mesopotamia, which remained predominantly Christian into the twentieth century.⁴ Despite this, conversion to Islam should not be regarded as the only religious option in the early period. While it is undeniable that most of the region’s Christians (and non-Muslims) converted to Islam gradually, there were many who chose to convert in less “popular” directions. These included Christians who embraced Islam but regretted their decision and returned to their original faith, the children of religiously mixed marriages who spurned their fathers’ Islam and adopted their mothers’ Christianity, and a small but significant group of Muslims from Muslim backgrounds who converted to Christianity. They constitute the focus of this and the next chapter.

Normally, such unconventional forms of conversion are invisible in Muslim sources. By and large, these texts paint a triumphalist portrait of Islamization as an irreversible process, one that was well on its way by the early ʿAbbasid period.⁵ Basing their research on these sources, too, some modern scholars have implicitly accepted the master narrative.⁶ Even among those who have not, many have concentrated their research on the question of when the Middle East first became predominantly Muslim, as if this benchmark were intrinsically important for understanding the shape of a society or were a foregone conclusion in the early period itself. The truth is that the demographic tipping point between Muslims and non-Muslims is almost impossible to know. Scholars of the medieval period lack the kind of reliable demographic data that could shed definitive light on the question, comparable to what we can glean from tax registers or censuses of later periods.⁷ Attempts to deduce such data from premodern sources have been met with mixed success—most notably, Richard Bulliet’s groundbreaking 1979 study Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History, which proposed conversion curves for different regions of the medieval Middle East on the basis of onomastic information in biographical literature (ṭabaqāt).⁸

Bulliet’s approach was creative and remains broadly influential nearly forty years after its publication. Despite this, it has had the practical effect of narrowing research on conversion to a cluster of broadly empirical questions, such as when conversion to Islam took place and how many individuals converted. Along the way, other basic questions related to the process of conversion have received less attention: How did converts relate to their old and new communities? How did relatives, friends, and neighbors perceive the conversion of their loved ones? How did conversion affect an individual’s political, social, and cultural identities? How did different kinds of literary sources represent the experience of religious change? Was conversion a discrete moment in time or a drawn-out process that lasted for many years, if not for generations?⁹

One way we can begin to answer these questions is by consulting the Christian martyrologies of the early Islamic period (a type of evidence whose usefulness Bulliet has doubted, unjustifiably so in my opinion).¹⁰ Many of these texts recount the stories of apostates who were executed for leaving Islam. Their motivations were varied, but in each case, we can see how the process of Islamization was neither absolute nor inevitable in the early years. Rather, the Middle East during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries was an intensely competitive world in which confessional costume changes were common. In this chapter, I wish to explore the nature of conversion in the early medieval Middle East by focusing on the first half of these convert martyrs, who began their lives as Christians, embraced Islam, and then returned to Christianity. I will also focus on martyrs from religiously mixed families, leaving the matter of “true apostates”—that is, Muslim converts to Christianity—to chapter 2.

The central argument of these two chapters may be summarized as follows: there were many forms of conversion in the early medieval Middle East other than the monolithic form of conversion that most scholars investigate today. Even if the number of apostates paled in comparison with the number of those who converted and remained Muslims, their paths in and out of Islam can tell us a great deal about how conversion worked more generally, especially the myriad social, spiritual, economic, and political pressures that powered religious change in the period. In a sense, we can understand the long-term, large-scale conversion of the Middle East better by investigating those exceptional moments when this process was undermined or reversed. For this reason, these two chapters present several case studies designed to highlight alternative models of conversion in the early medieval Middle East. These include apostasy from Islam in the context of slavery; conversion to Islam in contested circumstances, such as intoxication or financial disputes; apostasy within religiously mixed families; conversion due to alleged supernatural experiences; and apostasy caused by Muslims losing contact with Muslim communities and institutions.

These models accord well with much recent theoretical literature that has stressed the complexity and diversity of motivations behind conversion, as well as the variety of ways in which conversion can be represented and instantiated.¹¹ Thus, this chapter and the next investigate conversion in the context of spiritual excursions (Anthony al-Qurashī, Ibn Rajāʾ), social encounters with the religious other (ʿAbd al-Masīḥ, Elias), and cultural dislocation (Vahan, Abo). They also show how converts signaled their shift in allegiances by changes in appearance (Dioscorus), administrative status (Cyrus), social groups (George the Black), and naming (Bacchus) and by redefining their ties with broader family networks (Aurea). Above all, they reveal the importance of narrative in portraying the experience of conversion, particularly how authors represented conversion using literary devices that were intelligible and persuasive in the eyes of their readers.¹²

I. RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN THE POSTCONQUEST MIDDLE EAST: AN OVERVIEW

To understand what compelled martyrs to convert and revert, we must step around one popular image of conversion that is based on the experiences of famous figures such as Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, the Protestant Christians of the Second Great Awakening, and Malcolm X. This model understands conversion as an outward manifestation of a changing emotional, spiritual, or intellectual reality. Though this may describe some conversions in premodern times, it is inadequate for understanding what I would regard as the majority of conversions in the early Islamic period. In this world, conversion hinged not only on spiritual convictions but also on an array of social and political factors detached from questions of high theology. In fact, the line between religious conversion and cultural assimilation was often very blurry. For this reason, Arthur Darby Nock famously distinguished between the process of “conversion” and that of “adhesion,” in other words, a wholesale change of heart and practice and a kind of fence-sitting in which religious change was more cultural than creedal.¹³ Nock’s model has been hotly debated ever since. Recently, for instance, Linford Fisher has argued that it is better to speak about religious “engagement” or “affiliation” among Native American Christians in the colonial period rather than outright “conversion”—a distinction that holds for the early Islamic period, too.¹⁴

The issue of religious change in the early medieval Middle East raises a more fundamental question that scholars tend to overlook when discussing conversion: What kind of Islam were these converts embracing, and what kind of Christianity were they leaving behind?¹⁵ When we think back to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, it is important to recall that “Islam” and “Christianity” meant something very diffe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• A Note to Readers
• Maps
• Introduction: Christian Martyrs under Islam
• 1. Converting to Islam and Returning to Christianity
• 2. Converting from Islam to Christianity
• 3. Blaspheming against Islam
• 4. Trying and Killing Christian Martyrs
• 5. Creating Saints and Communities
• Conclusion: Making of the Muslim World
• Appendix 1. Comparing Christian and Muslim Accounts of Martyrdom
• Appendix 2. Glossary of Names and Key Words
• Bibliography
• Index