The Imam of the Christians

The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, c. 750–850

Philip Wood

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691219950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

How Christian leaders adapted the governmental practices and political thought of their Muslim rulers in the Abbasid caliphate The Imam of the Christians examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Focusing on the writings of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the patriarch of the Jacobite church, Philip Wood describes how this encounter produced an Islamicate Christianity that differed from the Christianities of Byzantium and western Europe in far more than just theology. In doing so, Wood opens a new window on the world of early Islam and Muslims' interactions with other religious communities.Wood shows how Dionysius and other Christian clerics, by forging close ties with Muslim elites, were able to command greater power over their coreligionists, such as the right to issue canons regulating the lives of lay people, gather tithes, and use state troops to arrest opponents. In his writings, Dionysius advertises his ease in the courts of ?Abd Allah ibn Tahir in Raqqa and the caliph al-Ma'mun in Baghdad, presenting himself as an effective advocate for the interests of his fellow Christians because of his knowledge of Arabic and his ability to redeploy Islamic ideas to his own advantage. Strikingly, Dionysius even claims that, like al-Ma'mun, he is an imam since he leads his people in prayer and rules them by popular consent.A wide-ranging examination of Middle Eastern Christian life during a critical period in the development of Islam, The Imam of the Christians is also a case study of the surprising workings of cultural and religious adaptation.

1

Lay Elites under Arab Rule

BY THE STANDARDS of the preindustrial world, the later Roman empire was a highly interventionist state. High levels of taxation were used to pay for a large standing army, which had dramatically increased in size after the invasions of the third century. Imperial fleets transported grain from Egypt, Africa and Sicily to feed massive capital cities at Rome and Constantinople.

This interventionism could place the Roman state at odds with its own aristocracy, since the latter possessed substantial resources that were potentially taxable. The aristocracy held massive wealth on an international scale and extracted revenue from tenants on its land, as well as from the sale of cash crops such as wine and oil.¹ Large disparities in wealth meant that the aristocracy was well placed to benefit from periods of economic insecurity, because such periods offered opportunities to acquire the lands of free peasants who had become impoverished.²

The Roman state used the aristocracy as a service elite to undertake functions such as the maintenance of civic infrastructure and the collection of taxes. Such employment generated an intrinsic tension, since the men who were supposed to act on behalf of the state might also privately seek to take advantage of their position by offering tax exemptions to their clients or even suborning parts of the army to police their private estates. When the state was strong and felt able to pick and choose among its supporters, it could oppose such practices directly. In the 540s, Justinian complained in his legislation about the massive tax evasion of the Egyptian aristocracy and the accumulation of armed retinues by the magnates of Cappadocia.³ But at other times, corrupt behaviour was simply represented as natural and inevitable.⁴

The available evidence for the Sasanian world does not afford the level of detail that the Roman legal codes and the Egyptian papyri do. But we can see a similar tension in the narrative sources on the late Sasanians, which depict a state that relied on the aristocracy to enforce its writ, but which acknowledge that the same aristocracy could also seek to acquire land from the peasantry or abuse its role as an agent of the state. Sasanian aristocrats certainly appreciated the rewards provided by the state, but they could also oppose or topple a shah who tried to curtail the rights of their houses.⁵

We get a good indication of the three-way relationship between the state, the aristocracy and the peasantry when one of these actors was removed. John of Nikiu, writing in the 690s but drawing on earlier sources, reports on the behaviour of Roman aristocrats in the Egyptian Delta during the period of disruption in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. In the absence of a strong Roman state, they raised private armies, besieged the cities of their rivals and increased the taxes they imposed on the peasantry.⁶ In other words, the immediate effect of the removal of the state was the freedom of the former service elite to use the local powers of the state to their own ends and for their own enrichment.

This chapter uses letters and saints’ lives to chart how many aristocracies benefited from the collapse of the Roman and Sasanian empires before the caliphs started to reassert their authority and demand higher taxes in the eighth century. Nevertheless, non-Muslim landed aristocrats persisted in many areas. What changed, I argue, is the increasing premium on good relations with Muslim patrons who might protect these elite interests.

Aristocrats in the Seventh Century

After the Arabs removed the previous administrations in the Near East, local aristocrats, working on behalf of the new rulers, took the opportunity to charge additional taxes for their own benefit or to claim the crown lands of the old Sasanian empire for themselves.⁷ Arab settlement in the seventh century was mostly restricted to a small number of new garrison cities (amṣār), and the territories beyond these cities were relatively unsupervised by the Muslim state.⁸ Aristocrats seem to have been given relatively free rein, whether or not they had converted to Islam, in what Chase Robinson has termed the ‘Indian summer’ of the Sufyanid period.⁹ We should not presume that this implied a golden age for the peasantry; it merely meant that much wealth was being consumed locally by aristocrats rather than being passed on to a central government.

What was this wealth spent on? To some degree, the post-Roman elites of the caliphate may have taken on some of the roles of the state that the caliphate did not initially fulfil, such as the minting of low-denomination coinage.¹⁰ Money was also likely spent on lavish consumption that is not archaeologically visible, such as food or textiles. Dionysius of Tel-Mahre accuses his ancestors of squandering a fortune on fine horses and hunting dogs.¹¹ But wealth was also channelled into expensive display architecture. In the former Roman world, churches are the most prominent example.¹²

Archaeological surveys in several parts of the Levant have highlighted the continuation of church building throughout the seventh century. Nessana, for instance, saw two massive churches built in that century, both larger than any of their sixth-century predecessors.¹³ The Transjordan witnessed the building of a range of churches in rural locations such as Madaba and Umm el-Jimal, often decorated with lavish mosaics.¹⁴ Palestine acquired some eleven new constructions in this period.¹⁵ In the Tur Abdin there was likewise a spate of construction of rural churches and monasteries.¹⁶ In both Palestine/Transjordan and in the Tur Abdin, this period of construction lasted until the last quarter of the eighth century.¹⁷ And though Iraq has not benefited from the kind of archaeological work that has been possible in the Levant, the dates of monastic foundations recorded in the ecclesiastical history of the Church of the East are clustered in the period 580–720, which provides an interesting parallel to the situation in the Levant.¹⁸ These monasteries lay mainly in northern Iraq, but they also included foundations near al-Hira and in Khuzestan.¹⁹

There are several patterns to this spate of building. The first, as Matta Guidetti has observed, is that church foundations are not apparent in major centres of Muslim settlement such as Damascus or Aleppo;²⁰ it is a phenomenon associated with secondary settlements and/or with peripheral regions such as northern Iraq or the Tur Abdin. Second, where their identities can be ascertained, the donors of these churches were often private individuals.²¹ Whereas in the sixth century the state had been a major builder of churches, by this time the donors were bishops²² or aristocrats, such as Gadimos, who built the great church at Nessana,²³ or the village chiefs mentioned in inscriptions in the Transjordan.²⁴ Even where we cannot identify church founders, the building of large numbers of churches in relatively small settlements (as at Ḥaḥ in the Tur Abdin or Umm el-Jimal in the Transjordan) suggests that rivalry between wealthy donors was a more powerful motivation than local need.²⁵

The construction of churches in the Islamic period is often studied with the intention of answering questions about the treatment of Christians under Muslim rule. Indeed, Robert Schick and Steve Humphreys are correct to observe that the construction and maintenance of churches demonstrates the existence o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Lay Elites under Arab Rule
• 2. Patriarchs and Bishops
• 3. Tithes, Authority and Hierarchy, 740–840
• 4. Changing Centres of Power: Harran, Kakushta and Cyrrhus
• 5. Takrit and Mosul: The Jacobite East
• 6. Worldviews and Communal Boundaries
• 7. Dionysius and al-Maʾmun
• 8. Patriarchate and Imamate: Dionysius’ Use of Muslim Political Thought
• 9. Conceptions of Suryaya Identity in the Sixth to Ninth Centuries
• Conclusions
• Regnal Tables
• List of Fragments of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre
• Bibliography
• Index