Download PDF | Alison Vacca - Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam_ Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania-Cambridge University Press (2017).
289 Pages
Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam
Eighth- and ninth-century Armenia and Caucasian Albania were largely Christian provinces of the then Islamic Caliphate. Although they formed a part of the Iranian cultural sphere, they are often omitted from studies of both Islamic and Iranian history. In this book, Alison Vacca uses Arabic and Armenian texts to explore these Christian provinces as part of the Caliphate, identifying elements of continuity from Sasanian to caliphal rule, and more importantly expounding on significant moments of change in the administration of the Marwanid and early Abbasid periods. Vacca examines historical narrative and the construction of a Sasanian cultural memory during the late ninth and tenth centuries to place the provinces into a broader context of Iranian rule. This book will be of benefit to historians of Islam, Iran, and the Caucasus, but will also appeal to those studying themes of Iranian identity and Muslim—Christian relations in the Near East.
Alison Vacca is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A recipient of the Fulbright Islamic Civilization Initiative award and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund fellowship, her research focuses on intercultural transmission of historical texts, the use of Arabic sources to tell Armenian history, the relationship between the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and inter-communal conflict between Muslims and Christians under early Islamic rule.
Acknowledgments
Buried somewhere in the pages of this book is a dissertation. As such, I owe a great debt to my two mentors and co-chairs of my dissertation committee, Professors Michael Bonner and Kevork Bardakjian, for their guidance, support, resilience, and patience during my time in Michigan. I believe the next round of drinks is on me, in perpetuity. I would also like to thank the other members of the committee: Kathryn Babayan, Timothy Greenwood, Christiane Gruber, and John Fine, for their attention to detail and thoughtful comments.
Over the course of the past decade, more or less, bits and pieces of this book have circulated among friends and colleagues who have provided valuable feedback as I worked though the sources and argument. In particular, I would like to thank Ozgen Felek, Noah Gardener, Rob Haug, Evyn Kropf, Sergio La Porta, Christina Maranci, Michael Morony, Michael Pifer, Zara Pogossian, and Steve Rapp. Through extensive emails, large quantities of coffee, informal chats on Skype, and formal conference panels, you have all helped me ask new questions and rethink old assumptions.
I would also like to thank my amazing colleagues in Knoxville, including Tom Burman, Manuela Ceballos, Matthew Gillis, and Tina Shepardson, for talking through drafts over innumerable Thai lunches, as well as Margaret Andersen, Chris Magra, and Charles Sanft for offering support, friendship, and advice throughout the process of writing and rewriting.
On a personal note, I’d like to thank my parents, Keith and Barbara Crossley, who taught all of their daughters to value education. They joined me along every step of this journey, starting with “Adventures in a Tro-Iro.”
Of course, I would be remiss without thanking Merik and Breccan, who have ensured that my search for knowledge included the names and levels of most Pokémon, the different types of Power Rangers, and the songs of Lady Gaga and Moana.
Finally and most importantly, I was only able to write this book because I had the support of a partner who would pick up the slack at home when needed and remind me to laugh at the world and at myself. And so I would especially like to thank Michael John, who urges me to sing along with the boys and belts out the lyrics on my behalf when I refuse.
Situating Places, People, and Dates
Balancing Armenian, Georgian, Albanian (as much as possible), Arab, and Iranian traditions demands that we establish certain patterns and norms from the start for the sake of consistency. We rely here on certain conventions intended to increase readability and accessibility. Dates appear streamlined as the Common Era rather than the hijri of Arabic and Persian texts, the Armenian era, the anno mundi of Byzantine sources, or the Georgian kronikon system. To further assist the reader, the index serves as a short glossary including a snippet definition of foreign terms and short details about authors and political figures, including date of death when available.
Other choices might not appear self-evident. For example, terms in Arabic are transcribed in English based on the most common transliteration system in American publications. This puts it at odds with the Armenian transcription, so that the Arabic U4 is rendered as -sh- while the Armenian 9 is instead -s-. The Arabic ¢ is -kh- while the Armenian [u is -x- and ¢ is -gh- but n is -#-. Persian is transcribed following the Arabic with the addition of -p- for and -g- for 4. To avoid both the Arabized and the Armenicized spellings, the Sasanian emperors appear based on the spelling in the Encyclopaedia Iranica with the exception of Antshirwan, as explained in Chapter 1. Following the example of several recent studies in medieval Armenian and Georgian history, the footnotes include the transcription of any text cited directly in Arabic, Persian, and Armenian. By contrast, the Greek and Syriac only appear if certain words have particular weight or to show the transformations as a word shifted from one language to another.
For the most part, toponyms appear in this book first in Arabic and then in Armenian or Georgian. So, for example, the capital of Armenia is Dabil/Duin and the capital of Albania is Bardh‘a/Partaw. Albanian place names are listed in Armenian, since our only Albanian source was written in Armenian. Georgian toponyms follow suit with both Arabic and Georgian, such as with Tiflis/Tp‘ilisi. While the identification of some of these toponyms should certainly be contested, the goal is to invite cross-disciplinary discussions by making it easier for Arabists to locate Armenian and Albanian toponyms.
The broader challenge relates to the provincial names and categories that we ascribe to the region. We must start with the recognition that all of the toponyms employed here — Armenia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran - are problematic in that they are constructed differently over time depending on the political and cultural realities of any given period. With the exception of Iran, we use the toponyms as found in Arabic sources throughout this book: Armenia (Arminiyya),! Albania (Arran),? and Georgia (Jurzan),* each of which likely entered Arabic via Middle Persian. The use of the terms Armenia, Albania, and Georgia streamlines the North into three easily comprehensible provinces, but the reality must have been much more complicated. The use of provincial toponyms perpetuates certain assumptions about the cohesiveness of these regional groupings in the medieval period, even though organizing by smaller regions or dynastic affiliations makes more sense. Arabic texts typically link Armenia and Albania and rarely identify Georgia as a separate province, hence the subtitle of this book omits Georgia even though eastern Georgia was an important part of the caliphal province. Cities in eastern Georgia instead appear in Arabic texts as part of Albania, as we will see in Chapter 2.
The word Caucasus rarely appears here. There are two reasons for this. First, the term Qabq appears rarely in Arabic histories about the Marwanid and early ‘Abbasid periods. Where it does appear, it is not consistently applied to Armenia. Oabq instead refers to the North and only parts of the South Caucasus. Mas‘iidi, for example, includes Georgia, Sharwan, and Bab al-Abwab/Darband as part of the Caucasus, but centers his discussion of the region around the Khazars, the Avars (Sarir), and the Ris.* The Armenian lands do not enter into this passage. The rarity of the term in Arabic sources relevant to Umayyad and ‘Abbasid rule, the exclusion of Armenia, and the inclusion of the Khazars render it difficult to adopt the term Oabg to the circumstances of caliphal rule.
Regardless, for our purposes there is no reason to use the term Caucasus when an alternative exists in Armenian, Georgian, Syriac, and Arabic sources from the Sasanian, Umayyad, and ‘Abbasid periods. Jarbi and garbya appear in Arabic and Syriac, respectively, to refer to the North in the Sasanian period. This builds on a much larger pattern in Armenian and Georgian, as we will see in Chapter 2, that defines the South Caucasus as the North: “rdiloy (north) and ¢‘rdiloysa k‘ueqanay (the land of the north) in Georgian and hiwsis (north) and kotmn hiwsisoy (northern region) in Armenian.° This is one of the few details that bridges all of our sources across linguistic divides, culled from all religious groups of the Near East, and extending from the pre-Islamic and into the Islamic periods. The North fits our body of sources far better than the Caucasus.
Accordingly, the toponyms found here are based mainly on the descriptions of the North as found in ‘Abbasid-era literature. The exception to this rule is Ivan, which hardly ever appears as such in contemporary sources.® Iran here refers to the broad and diverse oikoumene instead of the modern national boundaries. The territory is ex-Sasanian: érdn or Erangahr, the domain of the Iranians. By contrast, Persian refers to the language and anything specific to the province in southwest Iran called Persia, known in Arabic as Fars, even though the terms Ivan and Persia appear to be used interchangeably in many modern studies. The Sasanians were Persians and their empire was vast, so the Persian Empire spread, but that does not mean that all Sasanian provinces were Persian.
In much the same way, we here avoid the use of the term Arab unless speaking of individuals who explicitly identify as Arabs through genealogy or tribal nisbas, despite the fact that it has long been commonplace to refer to “Arab fiscal policy” or “Arab governors,” etc. This is not to place boundaries on Arabness or Iranianness, but to be cognizant of the complexities of medieval society and the concerns of our sources. Several of the Muslim amirs of Armenia appear frequently as Arabs in modern literature without any indication of their tribal or societal ties in the medieval sources. Who decided that the Zurarids were Arabs and on what evidence? Is it because they lived in Armenia at a time of increased Arabization? Is it because they spoke Arabic? And how do we know which language they spoke? Is it because they intermittently worked with the caliphal representatives and armies? Omitting the designation Arab does not dismiss their potential Arabness, but in fact allows for the possibility of ethnic difference in the North. Along similar lines, not all Arab governors of the North were Arabs, however much they represented Arab (i.e., caliphal) power.
These distinctions may rely on too strict of a definition for broader acceptance in the field of Islamic history.? They would cause significant trouble for anyone writing on Arabization, wala’, or the conquests, to name just a few examples. As such, they are not intended to suggest a model for writing about Iranian history. Instead, they speak to the main concerns of this book, which explores non-Arab provinces under Arab rule, non-Persian provinces in a diverse Iran, and non-Muslim provinces of an Islamic Caliphate. The Armenians, Georgians, and Albanians were not only distinct from Persians; at times, they were vehemently and violently opposed to Persians. Possibly even more than Persian rule, Iranian identity in the North hinges on the memories of Parthian power. Embracing the idea of Iran allows us to maintain the recognition of ethnic and religious differences while still fitting the North into the same cultural and political sphere as its neighbors
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