Download PDF | Salam Rassi - Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World_ ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition (Oxford Oriental Monographs)-OUP Oxford (2022).
313 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised version of my 2016 doctoral thesis, defended at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. I should first like to thank Sebastian Brock and Herman Teule for examining the thesis and recommending it for publication. David Taylor, my former doctoral advisor, supported this project from its inception and has always encouraged me to take the path less travelled. John-Paul Ghobrial welcomed me to Oxford as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and has since provided me with a great deal of moral as well as intellectual support.
Further thanks are owed to Yuhan D-S Vevaina, Nora Schmid, and Wahid Amin for casting their eyes on various chapters and providing me with invaluable feedback. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments, corrections, and insights, and to the team at Oxford University Press for steering the editorial process from start to finish. When I first set out on this topic there were relatively few resources available to those wishing to study the later history of Syriac and Christian Arabic literature. In many ways it felt like I was working from the ground up.
Fortunately, critical editions of several key works have since appeared thanks to the philological labours of Željko Paša, Gianmaria Gianazza, Bishara Ebied, and Nikolai Seleznyov (†). I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) for making several digitized Syriac and Arabic manuscripts freely available online. This book would have been all the more difficult to write were it not for the work of HMML and their partners across the Middle East. They are a credit to both researchers and the wider community, especially at a time when archives are coming under increasing threat. Conversations with colleagues, friends, and fellow travellers have been especially helpful.
For these interactions I am most thankful to Ahab Bdaiwi, Jonathan Brack, Anna Chrysostomides, Bogdan Draghici, Regula Forster, Tobias Graff, Simcha Gross, Nicholas Harris, Anabel Inge, Grigory Kessel, Feras Krimsti, Ryan Lynch, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Sergey Minov, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Samuel Noble, Lucy Parker, Adrian Pirtea, Liana Saif, Hidemi Takahashi, Jack Tannous, Cecilia Tarruell, and Dorthea Weltecke. Finally, I would like to thank Ália Rodrigues for her patience throughout this whole process, and for teaching me to be whole in everything and to put all I am in the smallest things I do.
Introduction: ‘A Constant but not Frozen Tradition’
Following the siege of Acre by the Mamluks in 1291, the last Crusader stronghold in Palestine finally fell, never to be recovered. The eventual Muslim reconquest of the Crusader-held cities along the Levantine coast led to successive waves of migrations across the Mediterranean. By the second half of the thirteenth century, the island of Cyprus had become home to communities of Arabic-speaking Christians from various ecclesial traditions known variously as ‘Syrian’, ‘Jacobite’, and ‘Maronite’.¹ Many had arrived after the fall of Crusader Byblos, Acre, and Tripoli, and settled in the city of Famagusta (known as Māghū: sa in Arabic), while others had arrived during earlier periods of migration. Amid this panoply of confessions was the Church of the East, Christians of the East Syrian rite known also as ‘Nestorians’.² Later waves of migration would bolster the numbers of this community, some of whom had already established themselves as a successful merchant class.³ Though subject to Frankish Lusignan rule, many members of the Church of the East in Cyprus refused to submit to the authority of the Latin Archbishop of Nicosia and instead maintained a distinct ecclesial identity.⁴
Among their representatives was Salībā ibn Yūhann : ā, a priest from the city of Mosul. In 1332, while residing in Famagusta, Salībā wrote a vast theological compendium in Arabic known as the Asfār al-asrār (‘The Books of Mysteries’).⁵ Woven into this work are chapters from a compendium by an older contemporary of Salībā named ʿAbdīshōʿ bar Brīkhā, metropolitan of Nisibis (d. 1318). Alongside ʿAbdīshōʿ feature other works in Arabic by Nestorian theologians, namely Elias bar Shennāyā (d. 1046), Makkīkhā (d. 1109), Elias ibn Muqlī (d. 1131), and Īshōʿyahb bar Malkon (d. 1246).⁶ In the same work we find Salībā’s continuation of a history of the patriarchs of the Church of the East from the Kitāb al-majdal fī al-istib: sār wa-l-jadal (‘Book of the Tower on Observation and Debate’), a summa theologica by ʿAmr ibn Mattā (fl. late tenth/early eleventh centuries).⁷ Three years later, in 1336, whilst still in Famagusta, Salībā completed a manuscript of theological miscellany, this time containing ʿAbdīshoʿ’s Arabic translation of the Gospel lectionary and his sermon on the Trinity and Incarnation, both in rhymed prose, together with an anti-Muslim apology, the so-called Letter from the People of Cyprus, composed anonymously on the island some years previously.⁸
Salībā’s compilatory activities suggest that by the first half of the fourteenth century a rich corpus of theological, liturgical, and historiographical literature in the Arabic language had emerged within the Church of the East. Syriac, the Church of the East’s lingua sacra, remained an active part of the Nestorian Cypriot community’s ecclesial identity.⁹ Yet, after centuries in Muslim lands prior to reaching their adoptive Cyprus, the Nestorian community could boast of a wealth of writers who in the early centuries of the Abbasid era (750–ca. 950) inaugurated a rich tradition of Christian theology in the Arabic language. This emergent literature was characterized as much by a need to answer Muslim and Jewish challenges to Christianity as to educate the faithful about the foundations of their religion.¹⁰ It was a tradition that continued to find expression among subsequent authors, not least by those memorialized in Salībā’s theological anthologies. For even in Cyprus, where Arabophone Christians lived apart from their erstwhile non-Christian neighbours in the Middle East, the Arabic language continued to function as a vehicle for their articulation of Christian identity. This book examines those very authors whom Salībā saw as emblematic of this theological tradition, with a special focus on the poet, canonist, and alchemical writer, ʿAbdīshōʿ bar Brīkhā. At this point, we should note that modern scholars have paid scarce attention to most of the above-mentioned authors, least of all to ʿAbdīshōʿ.
Few have studied him in light of his theology, much of which, as we shall see throughout this book, he composed with an apologetic¹¹ purpose in mind, and which found expression through a variety of genres, from rhymed prose to verse exposition. Instead, ʿAbdīshōʿ is chiefly remembered as a cataloguer and compiler by modern scholars, many of whom frequently trawl his works for information about earlier periods of Christian literature. Fewer still have fully appreciated ʿAbdīshōʿ’s bilingualism, viewing him as an author who wrote mainly in Syriac while editions of his Arabic works have only recently appeared. Moreover, many scholars have viewed the opening centuries of the Abbasid caliphate as the most creative period of Christian–Muslim theological exchange, after which Christian theology became stagnant, repetitive, and unimaginative. Consequently, a far greater importance has been ascribed to a ‘formative phase’ of theology which neglects the tradition’s later development and reception. Conversely, some have argued that ʿAbdīshōʿ wrote at the height of a ‘Syriac Renaissance’ and that it was only after his death in 1318 that a period of decline crept in. My aim in this book is not to determine the precise date of Syriac Christianity’s ‘Dark Age’ (if indeed there ever was one), nor is it to argue for a period of renaissance.
As we shall see further in this study, both historiographical categories—‘decline’ and ‘renaissance’—are highly problematic lenses through which to study the history of any intellectual tradition. Rather, my purpose is to go beyond narratives of decline and revival by asking: if Syriac Christianity’s most creative period of engagement with Islamic theology ended after the early Abbasid period, why, then, did Salībā ibn Yūhann : ā see fit to compile the apologetics of so many later writers? At the end of his history of Christian theology in the Muslim world, Sydney Griffith remarks that after having undergone a ‘formative’ phase in the ninth century, during which the ‘main lines of Christian thought in the Arabic-speaking, Islamic milieu were drawn’, the theological idiom of Christians would become ‘constant but not frozen’.¹² It is in this spirit that I intend to examine the intellectual output of later medieval Christian writers living in the Islamic world. To test my hypothesis of a constant yet unfrozen theological tradition, I will focus my enquiry on the hitherto neglected writings of ʿAbdīshōʿ bar Brīkhā (also known as ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis). In doing so I wish to demonstrate that the advent of Islam did more than shape an anti-Muslim apologetic agenda among Christians; it also led to the development of a rich and complex theological language among Christians of all stripes living under Muslim rule. Though responsive to Muslim theological challenges, this tradition was itself shaped and conditioned by the cultural, linguistic, and even religious fabric of the Islamicate societies in which it developed.
This book seeks to show how by the thirteenth century, Arabic and its attendant literary canon served as an important site of intellectual production for many Christian writers, among whom ʿAbdīshoʿ was no exception. The output of Arabic-using Christian authors exhibits a remarkable level of engagement with the culture of their day, giving new and productive meaning to long-established theological ideas. Yet, as I hope to also illustrate, ʿAbdīshoʿ tempered this interculturality with a stated preference for the Syriac language, for centuries a vehicle of ecclesiastical instruction and liturgy in the Church of the East. As mentioned already, ʿAbdīshōʿ wrote prolifically in Syriac as well as Arabic. In fact, his poetic and legal works in the former would go on to enjoy a high degree of popularity among Syriac Christians in subsequent centuries, and today’s Assyro-Chaldean Christians still consider him among their most eminent doctors.
In this book, I will explore the various points of contact and divergence between ʿAbdīshoʿ’s Syriac and Arabic writings, since both are essential to our understanding of his position as one of the most influential figures in the history of the Church of the East. By focusing on ʿAbdīshoʿ bar Brīkhā, this book examines the very genre of apologetics and its foremost significance among Christians living in Islamicate environments. By disentangling the complex layers of source material that characterize the genre, this book attempts to situate Christian apologetics within a broader intellectual history of the medieval Islamicate world.
My first chapter (‘Authority, Compilation, and the Apologetic Tradition’) sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of this study. It begins by outlining the Syriac-language works for which ʿAbdīshōʿ is chiefly known, followed by an inventory of his extant writings. Having established these preliminaries, I go on to survey his five main theological works, together with important aspects of their literary afterlife. Three of these works comprise encyclopaedic summaries of church doctrine and are responsive to non-Christian critiques of Christianity. After reviewing what little scholarship these texts have occasioned, I outline an approach to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s apologetic oeuvre that considers their genre, language, composition, subject matter, and audience. This means elaborating some definitions by asking: if ʿAbdīshōʿ’s theology is apologetic in the main, then how do we define apologetics? How are such works distinct from polemics, an interdependent category? And how were such categories understood by premodern Syriac and Christian Arabic authors? In addition to delineating the genre of ʿAbdīshōʿ’s theology, this chapter will also discuss its encyclopaedic nature. I argue that while his apologetics might appear as a patchwork of earlier source material, the practice of compilation was in fact part of a centuries-long catechetical tradition. Common to many churches under Muslim rule, this tradition sought to uphold and sustain a stable canon of dogma and, consequently, a distinct religious identity.
In order to better understand this practice on its own hermeneutical terms, this chapter will establish a typology for such Syriac and Christian Arabic theological compendia, or summae. In doing so, I will discuss the various kinds of religious authority that ʿAbdīshōʿ sought to affirm through his apologetics. In addition to patristic and late antique theological traditions, our author also draws from earlier medieval Arabic Christian authors—authors whose ideas were forged in response to and in conversation with Islam. I will also explore points of contact and divergence between the types of apologetics that ʿAbdīshōʿ produced and comparable genres in the Islamicate world, both Christian and nonChristian. Situating such works in what scholars have variously termed a ‘shared lettered tradition’, an ‘intellectual koinē’, and a ‘religious cosmopolitan language’, I make the case that ʿAbdīshōʿ’s defence of Christianity is at once rooted in symbols and motifs common to Muslims while simultaneously setting Christians apart from them. As such, this chapter will discuss intersections between language, literature, and identity in ʿAbdīshōʿ’s apologetics, with a focus on notions of Christian belonging and exclusion. Chapter 2 (‘The Life and Times of a “Most Obscure Syrian”’) explores our author’s world based on his own testimonies and those of his contemporaries. While we possess few facts about his life, the cultural, political, and intellectual history of the Church of the East in the thirteenth century is relatively welldocumented. ʿAbdīshōʿ’s literary activities took place at the height of Mongol rule over a region of Upper Mesopotamia known as the Jazīra.
The destruction of the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258 and the subsequent establishment of the Ilkhanate inaugurated four decades or so of non-Muslim rule by mainly Shamanist and Buddhist sovereigns over a largely Muslim region. In 1295, the Mongol elite in the Middle East officially converted to Islam. This development had far reaching consequences for the region’s non-Muslim population and may have informed our author’s anti-Muslim apologetics. I also situate ʿAbdīshōʿ’s literary output in a period during which Syriac and Arabic Christian scholarship was becoming increasingly indebted to Islamic theological and philosophical models. While ʿAbdīshōʿ’s own involvement in the broader intellectual networks of his day appears limited, his work on alchemy evinces a high level of engagement with Arabo-Islamic modes of knowledge production. This receptiveness to nonChristian models is less obvious in ʿAbdīshōʿ’s other works but is nevertheless present in his apologetics. Having established ʿAbdīshōʿ in his time and place, Chapter 3 (‘The One is Many and the Many are One: ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Trinitarian Thought’) explores his writings on the Trinity, a key Christian tenet that many Muslim polemicists believed to be a form of tritheism. This charge was levelled repeatedly in the centuries leading up to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s lifetime, prompting Christian apologists to demonstrate that God was a unitary being without denying His triune nature.
In line with earlier authors, ʿAbdīshōʿ begins by establishing the existence of the world and its temporal origins from a single, infinite cause, which he infers from the orderliness and composite nature of the cosmos. He then argues that this cause must possess three states of intellection identical to its essence, while affirming the three Trinitarian Persons as essential attributes in a single divine substance. While these strategies owe much to earlier apologies, ʿAbdīshōʿ frames them in a technical language that resonates with aspects of the philosophized Muslim theology (kalām) of his day by making use of Avicennian expressions of God as Necessary Being. But rather than simply borrowing from Islamic systems, our author demonstrates that the issues raised by Muslims concerning the Trinity could be resolved internally, that is, through recourse to scripture and the authority of earlier Christian thinkers. A theme closely connected to the issue of God’s unicity is the Incarnation, discussed in Chapter 4 (‘Debating Natures and Persons: ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Contribution to Christology’). Central to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s defence of this doctrine is the argument that Christ possessed a divine and a human nature, each united in a single person.
For Muslim polemicists such a notion was further proof of Christianity’s denial of God’s transcendence, leading ʿAbdīshōʿ to make a case for the Incarnation’s rootedness in both reason and revelation. As in his Trinitarian doctrine, our author appeals to a theological and literary vocabulary shared between Arabicreading Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, he explicitly cites Christian authorities, suggesting that it is to the language of Islamic theology rather than its substance that he wishes to appeal. With that said, ʿAbdīshōʿ does not merely instrumentalize this language for the sake of apologetics. By employing poetic and narrative techniques shared between Christian and Muslim literatures, our author supplies renewed meaning and relevance to the mystery of the Incarnation and the Biblical story of Christ’s mission. In particular, I look at ʿAbdīshōʿ’s engagement with the Sufi language of ecstatic union and possible correspondences between his narrativization of Jesus’s life and the Buddhist-derived Arabic legend of Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf. In contrast to his Trinitarian dogma, which appears uniformly directed against external criticisms, aspects of ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Christology are grounded in intra-Christian polemics, since various Christian confessions under Islamic rule were for centuries divided over the issue of Christ’s natures.
Later in life, however, ʿAbdīshōʿ skilfully negotiated this vexed theological inheritance to formulate a Christology that was no longer hostile to other Christians. The final chapter of this book (‘Christian Practices, Islamic Contexts: Discourses on the Cross and Clapper’) examines ʿAbdīshōʿ’s justification of Christian devotional practice. In particular, I examine his discussion of the veneration of the Cross and the striking of a wooden percussion instrument known as the clapper, used in the call to prayer.¹³ In line with earlier apologists, ʿAbdīshōʿ’s explanation of Christian cult affirms its validity in a socio-cultural environment that was sometimes at odds with it. Here, I situate ʿAbdīshōʿ’s apology within a contested visual and acoustic environment shared in by Muslims and Christians. Christian writers in the Islamicate world often contended with the accusation that the veneration and public display of the Cross constituted a form of idolatry, and that the sound of the clapper in times of prayer was offensive to Muslims and inferior to the call of the muʾadhdhin. In addition to providing scriptural testimony for the veneration of the Cross, our author appeals to a kalām-inflected language to explain the salvific function of the Crucifixion and the cosmological significance of the Cross’s four points. Similarly, he invokes an instance where the call of the clapper features positively in a poetic sermon attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib (d. 661), thereby invoking a common lettered tradition to legitimate an otherwise marginal practice. Although the tradition pertains to ʿAlī, a foundational figure in Islam, ʿAbdīshōʿ employs the sermon to illustrate how Christian sacred tradition—in this case, the apocryphal story of Noah’s use of the clapper to signal salvation from the Flood—is consonant with Muslim models of piety and repentance. Moreover, ʿAlī’s resonance in the Christian imaginary was also trans-linguistic, since many of the ethical and moralizing themes in his sermon emerge in ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Syriac poetry.
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