Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) Thomas A. Carlson - Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq-Cambridge University Press (2018).
325 Pages
Christians in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazira were socially and culturally at home in the Middle East, practicing their distinctive religion despite political instability. This insightful book challenges the normative Eurocentrism of scholarship on Christianity and the Islamic exceptionalism of much Middle Eastern history to reveal the often unexpected ways in which interreligious interactions were peaceful or violent in this region.
The multifaceted communal selfconcept of the “Church of the East” (so-called “Nestorians”) reveals cultural integration, with certain distinctive features. The process of patriarchal succession clearly borrowed ideas from surrounding Christian and Muslim groups, while public rituals and communal history reveal specifically Christian responses to concerns shared with Muslim neighbors. Drawing on sources from various languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Syriac sources, this book opens new possibilities for understanding the rich, diverse, and fascinating society and culture that existed in Iraq during this time.
Thomas A. Carlson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. He holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, and is the coeditor of an online geographic reference tool for Syriac culture, The Syriac Gazetteer.
Acknowledgements
This book was first imagined at Oxford, developed at Princeton, and completed at Oklahoma State, and I have incurred many individual and institutional debts, at all three institutions and beyond. I am grateful to David Taylor and Alison Salvesen, under whose tutelage I first explored Syriac Christianity, and to Peter Brown, Michael Cook, Bill Jordan, John Haldon, Anthony Grafton, and Helmut Reimitz who tempted, coached, and compelled me to locate my studies in wider worlds of history and of scholarship. Peter Brown and Michael Cook, in particular, have both continued to provide encouragement even after my dissertation defense absolved them of further responsibility, and I am very grateful for their correspondence and conversation.
At Oklahoma State, I find myself in a very collegial department, of which I must particularly thank Laura Arata, Yongtao Du, Emily Graham, Jim Huston, Lesley Rimmel, Richard Rohrs, Mike Thompson, Stephanie Wheatley, and Anna Zeide for prompting me to rethink aspects of my arguments, as well as Laura Belmonte, David D’Andrea, John Kinder, and Jason Lavery for their wisdom regarding publication processes. Tuna Artun, Sebastian Brock, the late Patricia Crone, Stephen Humphreys, George Kiraz, Nick Marinides, Adam McCollum, David Michelson, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Hidemi Takahashi, Deborah Tor, Joel Walker, and David Wilmshurst have each provided important insights and encouragement along the way. I am very grateful to Chase Robinson, Maria Marsh, and Cambridge University Press for their sustained interest in this book project and their guidance for a novice author through the ups and downs of the peer review and revision processes. Christian Sahner, Jack Tannous, Lev Weitz, Luke Yarbrough, and the anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press have done more than anyone else to save me from embarrassing mistakes. Any that remain are likely due to my stubborn refusal to heed the advice of my betters.
The sources on which this argument subsists have been located and made available to me by more staff members than I even know, at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the British Library, Princeton’s Firestone Library, Princeton Seminary’s Speer Library, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, the Biblioteka Jagiellonska of Krakow, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan office at Oklahoma State University. As revision progressed, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library made more primary sources available through their incomparable digitization initiatives. I thank Joshua Falconer for visiting the Library of Congress to digitize microfilms on my behalf, when late in the writing process I needed to consult a source and could not travel.
While scholarship subsists on sources, the author’s material needs were generously met by funding from Princeton’s Graduate School, History Department, Program in Hellenic Studies, and the Center for the Study of Religion; by the Whiting Foundation; by the Balzan Foundation grant to Syriaca.org; and by the History Department of Oklahoma State University, which graciously granted me a research leave with which to finish the book. Additional research support was provided by the Graduate Student Book Prize of Gorgias Press; Wolfson College, Oxford; Princeton University’s Margaret Goheen Summer Travel Fellowship; and the College of Arts & Sciences at Oklahoma State University. This book would not have been possible without that generous financial support each step of the way. If a man does not live by bread alone, equally essential has been the unfailing familial support from my parents, Elizabeth and Wayne Saewyc, Peter and Angela Carlson, and from my in-laws, Philip and Joan Irvin, as well as all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings who did not always understand what I was doing, but were glad to see me do it. My wife, Mary, has done more for me and for this book than she realizes, and I am very grateful for it. Finally, in the words of a Syriac scribe who wrote in 1493, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, by whose might we began and with whose help we finished.
Introduction
On a hill overlooking the city of Mosul from across the Tigris River, in what is today northern Iraq, there stood a building with a very long history. At the time of the Arab Islamic conquests in the seventh century, and for centuries thereafter, it was a Christian monastery dedicated to the prophet Jonah, visited by Muslims as well as Christians.! A mosque built adjoining the monastery eventually co-opted the original structure, and when Timir Lang conquered the city at the end of the fourteenth century, he visited the tomb shrine dedicated to Nabi Yiinus, as the prophet came to be known in Arabic.? Despite its conversion, the shrine remained accessible to Christians as well as Muslims, until it was detonated in the summer of 2014 by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In their quest to eliminate what they believe to be tantamount to polytheism, ISIS has also erased the long history of religious diversity in Iraq’s northern metropolis.’
Before 2014, Mosul always had been a multireligious city. A Christian priest who took refuge in the city in 1918 recorded a list of fifty-five mosques out of “many without number,” as well as seventeen churches (one of which was abandoned) and four monasteries.‘
In 1743, according to an earlier priest seeking the city’s refuge during wartime, the Ottoman governor commanded Muslims, Christians, and Jews to prepare the city’s defense against the siege of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah, and when the siege was lifted, the Ottoman sultan permitted the Christians to rebuild their churches, eight within Mosul itself.° Two centuries earlier, Mosul was where Christians had gathered from various cities in the region to send an unexpected letter to the pope in Rome complaining about their patriarch.® In the last years of the fifteenth century, Mosul had been both the patriarchal residence for one Syriac Christian denomination and the headquarters for the second-highest-ranking ecclesiastical official in a rival Syriac hierarchy, making it not only a major Islamic city, but also the Christian capital of post-Mongol Iraq.’
The significance of the city of Mosul to Christians as well as Muslims is not unusual for the late medieval Middle East, where Muslim rulers still governed substantial non-Muslim populations.’ The Cairo Geniza provides the most spectacular, but not the only, demonstration of non-Muslim diffusion across the medieval Middle East.? The fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battiita noted the large number of Christians in Anatolia, and on his travels he benefited from the hospitality of a Syrian monastery.!° Nor were Jews and Christians the only non-Muslims in the region: a fifteenth-century Christian author from Erbil in northern Iraq referred to the Yezidi followers of Shaykh ‘Adi.'! The pilgrimage guide of the twelfth-century traveler ‘Alt al-Harawi gave numerous examples of sacred places shared among Muslims, Christians, and Jews, for example a stone outside the “Jewish Gate” at Aleppo.!? The late medieval Middle East was diverse but not ghettoized or balkanized, a world in which people of different religions rubbed shoulders on a daily basis.
At the crossroads of Eurasia, the Middle East may well have housed the most diverse society in the premodern world. Indeed, the presence of non-Muslims was so pervasive in much of the medieval Middle East that it “went without saying.” Even as prominent an achievement of Islamic culture as the fifteenth-century astronomical manual (zi) of Ulugh Bey b. Shahrukh, the Timurid ruler of Samarqand, silently drew information from an Iraqi Christian source. The work’s discussion of the Seleucid (“Rim?”) calendar included common Christian holidays such as Nativity, Epiphany, Annunciation, and the “Feast of the Cross” (‘d-i salib).'’° The distinctive dates given to those holidays unmistakably point to an informant from the Church of the East, with its hierarchy centered in northern Iraq.'* Yet the zi not only failed to mention the “Nestorian” source: it nowhere explicitly mentioned Christianity. It did not need to, because even in Samarqand, non-Muslim ways of keeping time were presumed to be recognizable.
The range of ethnicities, languages, and religions of the medieval Middle East also reminds modern observers that diversity is not a product of European globalization. Middle Eastern society before 1500 gives scholars an opportunity to analyze the dynamics of diversity before nationalism, liberalism, secularism, global capitalism, or the other -isms that constitute the particularly Europeanized modern world order. Thus the study of medieval Middle Eastern diversity may provide a counterbalance to the alternately comforting or cautionary tales we modern people tell ourselves about the diverse world in which we live today.
DIVERSITY VIEWED FROM WITHIN
Unlike most premodern societies, which supported only a single or a few social groups with the ability to compose texts, the medieval Middle East’s social diversity was expressed by a large number of literate classes whose works allow scholars to approach the dynamics of diversity from multiple angles. The Islamic learned elite (‘ulama@’) represent only one class of authors, alongside Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian religious leaders, and exceptional members of the ruling, mercantile, and professional classes (especially physicians).
Indeed, for questions of diversity, the works of the ‘ulamd’ often give a clearer picture of how they thought society ought to function than how in fact difference worked in practice.’ Histories and chronicles authored by ‘ulamd’ evinced decreasing levels of interest in non-Muslims.'* Sporadic exceptions are found in travel accounts by such authors as Ibn Battiita, yet his choice of details was haphazard and colored by his own normative interests. The literati of less privileged groups, such as Christians and Jews, recorded in much greater detail how religious difference was lived out in the medieval Middle East.!” To learn about religious diversity, scholars must attend to non-Muslim voices directly."
Nevertheless, the non-Muslims of the late medieval Middle East rarely inform modern historical scholarship. By convention, Islamic historians briefly acknowledge the existence of non-Muslims under Islamic rule, at least for the first millennium CE, while ascribing no historical significance to their continued presence.’? Almost forty years after his death, Marshall Hodgson’s work is still characteristic of most of the field: after conceding that “of course, non-Muslims have always formed an integral, if subordinate element” of “Islamicate” society, he proceeded to tell a story of Muslim rulers and Muslim intellectuals.” Jonathan Berkey’s The Formation of Islam gives much greater attention to non-Muslims than most scholars, yet even his treatment segregates them into chapters apart from his main story, and only discusses them before the year 1000 CE.?! The result is that the study of the Middle East after 1000 CE often becomes almost exclusively the history of Islam and of Muslims, while silently excluding the many others who were in fact present.”
Yet this confessional definition of the field is unwarranted: at no point before 1461 were all Middle Eastern rulers Muslims, and we do not know when Islam became the religion of a demographic majority even in lands under “Islamic rule.” The only significant study of demographic Islamization remains Richard Bulliet’s Conversion to Islam, which attempts to extrapolate demography from the “Who’s Who” of Muslim ‘ulama@ , somewhat akin to trying to determine American population dynamics based on professors at Christian seminaries.74 As Tamer el-Leithy points out, our ignorance regarding the process of Islamization largely stems from the fact that medieval authors saw no political relevance in the relative demography of religious groups.” In fact, such indications as do exist suggest that non-Muslims were almost as numerous as Muslims in portions of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq into the fifteenth century.*° The confessional demarcation of Middle Eastern history as “Islamic” misrepresents the experience of ethnic and religious diversity in the medieval world between the Nile and the Oxus Rivers.
When historians do consider Middle Eastern Christian populations, they often privilege the more familiar European forms of the religion.”’ Studies comparing Islam and Christianity often take a narrowly European definition of the latter.*® Islamicists continue to deploy categories of Christian “orthodoxy” (and, by implication, “heresy”) to Middle Eastern Christians from the normative perspective of European Christendom, which only slowly became the dominant form of Christianity in Eurasia over the course of the Middle Ages.”? Thus Middle Eastern Christians often find themselves in a “catch-22” of scholarly expectations. To the degree that their society and culture agreed with that of their Muslim neighbors, they are regarded as “authentically” Middle Eastern, but also as adulterating their (Western) religion.
To the degree that their theology and religious practice agreed with those of European coreligionists, they are regarded as “authentically” Christian, but also as foreigners in their native lands. The discourse of authenticity is a dangerous yardstick for judging social and cultural integration, precisely because of the canonical status conferred upon Middle Eastern Arab Muslims and European Christians. To the Muslim inhabitants of medieval Iraq and Syria, however, European Christianity was bizarre compared with Middle Eastern forms of the religion.*! The study of the late medieval Church of the East, probably the largest non-Muslim population in Iraq, challenges Eurocentric definitions of Christianity and suggests the possibility of framing the late medieval Middle East as a diverse society mostly ruled by Muslims.
EAST SYRIAN CHRISTIANITY AND THE WIDER WORLD
The breadth of terrain inhabited by the Church of the East is not readily designated by regional or national boundaries, whether medieval or modern. Mosul, the geographical center of this regional study, is now part of Iraq. Medieval Arabic geographers divided regions differently: to the south of Mosul along the Tigris River was the smaller region of Iraq, while to its west and northwest, as far as the headwaters of the Tigris, lay the region of al-Jazira, as Mesopotamia was then known.*? Further east and northeast of the Mosul plain lay the region of Adharbayjan, and due north lay the mountains of Arminiya.°*> The late medieval region of Syria, which ended at the Euphrates, was at that time across an imperial boundary, under the control of Egypt’s Mamlik Empire. This study ranges from Baghdad in the south to the Kurdish and Armenian mountains in the north, and from Amid (modern Diyarbakir in Turkey) in the west as far as Tabriz (today in northwest Iran) in the east.*4
The Christian minorities of these regions were not negligible, although they have been neglected. John Woods cites European travelers’ accounts demonstrating “[t]he large number of Christians relative to Muslims in the urban centers of Arminiya and Diyar Bakr” in the fifteenth century, a phenomenon also visible in early Ottoman defters.* In the following century, Ottoman records indicate that the population of Mosul and its hinterland was around one-third Christian.*° Although no systematic information about the proportion of the region’s population that belonged to Christianity or other religions is available from the fifteenth century, these limited data indicate that in certain areas the Christian population was substantial, to say the least. Despite this fact, the literary histories produced for Muslim rulers very rarely mention these subject populations.
The modern historical narrative of this period, basing itself on these literary histories, has told the story of two nomadic Tiirkmen confederations: the Qaragittyunli, or “Black Sheep Tiirkmen,” ruling Iraq from bases in Mosul, Tabriz, and Baghdad, and the Aqqiyunli, or “White Sheep Tiirkmen,” ruling what is now eastern Turkey from the area around Amid and later Tabriz, after the Aqqiyunli defeated the Qaraqiyunli.*” The scholarly account of Muslim rulers and Islamic religious leaders ignores the large non-Muslim population, and thus misses the social and cultural dynamics of what was in fact a very diverse society.
It is probable that the largest non-Muslim population of Iraq and southern al-Jazira was the Church of the East, a Christian denomination whose patriarchs lived in Mosul or the surrounding plain at the end of the fifteenth century.** Before the rise of Islam, this group had been the most prominent branch of Christianity in the Sasanian Persian Empire.*? It claimed a first-century foundation by the saints Addai and Mari, disciples of the apostle Thomas, although evidence for the existence of the church in the first three centuries of the Common Era is very sparse.
In the Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, the Church of the East gained a reputation for “Nestorianism” by virtue of its refusal to condemn Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople as a heretic, although in fact their theology was influenced less by the ideas of Nestorius himself than by those of his teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428). Under the early ‘Abbasid caliphate, the patriarchal residence of the Church of the East moved from Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of the defunct Persian Empire, to Baghdad, and this community contributed to the intellectual culture of the caliph’s capital with translations of Greek philosophical and medical works into Arabic.
From the seventh century they sent missionaries to Central Asia and China, expanding so significantly among the steppe nomads that when Hiilegii, the grandson of Genghis Khan, conquered Baghdad and destroyed the ‘Abbasid caliphate in 1258, his chief queen Doquz Khatiin was a member of the Church of the East. She persuaded the Mongol commander to spare the Christians of the city. Under Mongol rule, Middle Eastern Christians of all varieties enjoyed royal patronage again, and the Mongol rulers of Persia sometimes sent them as ambassadors to the Latin states of Europe.*°
The Church of the East was socially and culturally at home in the Middle East, even as it confronted the chronic political instability of the fifteenth century under Tiirkmen rule. Seemingly incessant wars were punctuated by bandit raids, mob violence, and insatiable tax-collectors, the symptoms of a society under stress. In this context, the Church of the East saw itself primarily as a Christian community, but it defined that in a Middle Eastern (and specifically Iraqi) manner rather than based on Western assumptions. They defined their Christianity by theology and ritual, through prayers to Christ as God, as well as socially and historically through their ecclesiastical hierarchy and their saints. Their understandings of Christianity reveal complex dimensions of diversity in the late medieval Middle East.
THE DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY
This study examines multiple social and cultural dimensions to religious diversity in al-Jazira and Iraq under Tiirkmen rule, from the conquests of Timi Lang (d. 1405) to those of the Safavid Shah Isma‘il starting in 1501. To understand how social diversity functioned, it is necessary to understand the varieties of diversity present. Since the fifteenth-century history of these regions is unfamiliar to most scholars, Chapter 1 sketches the independence of local Tiirkmen and Kurdish rulers, lays out the different Christian groups present, and documents the social structure within the Church of the East itself.
The next two chapters explore how social relations functioned across religious boundaries, first between Muslim rulers and their Christian subjects, and secondly among subjects both Muslim and non-Muslim. While scholars have typically studied the “status” of Christians in Islamic society through the framework of the Pact of ‘Umar’s regulations on dhimmi (non-Muslim) populations, Chapter 2 suggests that there was no overarching framework structuring rulers’ relations with their subjects in late medieval al-Jazira and Iraq. This lack of a shared script led to both unexpected opportunities for and extreme violence against fifteenth-century Christians. Chapter 3 includes the discourse of dhimmi status within the broad range of ways in which Muslim subjects (including ‘ulama’) and Christian subjects interacted, relations which were occasionally violent and occasionally friendly but more often distrustful.
The cultural dimensions of this diversity include the ways in which different groups shared — or alternatively diverged in — ideas and values, as well as the broad-based concepts used by the people of the past to understand the diversity of the society in which they lived. To access these ideas and values requires interpreting sources which historians typically ignore, such as poetry, theology, ritual, and even manuscript colophons.*! A priest from northern Iraq named Ishaq Shbadnaya (fl. 1751 AG / 1440) composed the largest original fifteenth-century Syriac work, a long theological survey in verse, as well as several shorter poems for liturgical celebrations.*” Other liturgical poems were composed by his contemporary Isho‘yahb b. Mgaddam, the metropolitan of Erbil in northern Iraq, as well as four poems for funerals.
These sources reveal these authors’ ideas not only about their indicated subjects, but about a range of other topics as well. In addition to such works, a nearly complete set of service books from the fifteenth-century Church of the East permits the use of ritual action as a historical source, although one with unique challenges. Communal liturgies not only influenced East Syrian clergy, including authors and scribes, through their familiar words, but the accompanying actions also communicated and emphasized certain concepts about the community to all present. Finally, there are nearly three dozen surviving colophons, notes at the end of manuscripts, which provide evidence for scribes’ systems of values, beliefs, and concepts.“ In their plurality, colophons provide a large range of viewpoints on cultural and intellectual developments, if only very partially represented, to balance the more complete pictures given by the few named literary authors of the fifteenth century.
For the cultural historian these texts are veritable gold mines of meanings, understandings, frameworks, and concepts that were significant enough to this Christian minority in the fifteenth century to find expression in written texts. Chapters 5-9 examine in turn the widespread concepts of God, Christ, ritual, hierarchy, and history held by the fifteenth-century Church of the East. Cultural continuity or discontinuity, comparable ideas held by other Middle Eastern groups, as well as this religious minority’s distinctive ideas and how they changed in the fifteenth-century, are legitimate questions for scholarly analysis. But more important than either continuity or difference is the question, difficult to answer definitively, how such concepts functioned socially. The topics of Chapters 5-9 are not haphazard, but are core concepts in how fifteenth-century Iraqi Christians defined their Christianity, not only theologically but also practically, socially, and historically. For this reason, cultural sources such as these texts likewise reveal how this group understood their communal existence and lived in a more diverse society. This approach generalizes the work of Benedict Anderson on “imagined communities,” while critiquing the assumptions and limitations of his framework, as outlined in Chapter 4.
The study of social and cultural diversity in late medieval al-Jazira and Iraq reveals a society that, despite the conflicting claims of apologists and polemicists, was neither ceaselessly persecuting minorities nor a utopian convivencia.* It was instead a hierarchical and partially divided society, with mechanisms for living with difference and sometimes shared cultural values across social boundaries. To understand how this society functioned, and indeed how diversity works in any society, scholars need to identify the significant structures and divisions, the shared or divergent cultural values, and the manners in which these differences were lived out in practice. This book is offered as a first exploration of what might be found by striking off into the late medieval Middle East’s terra incognita, with diversity as a compass.
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