鲍默《东方教会：亚述基督教图史》第七章：伊斯兰统治下的基督徒（中英文对照版）

Christians under Islamic Rule VII

Christians in the Persian Gulf region and in Arabia

work in Arabia began on the northern coast along the Persian Gulf. Presumably it was first ascetic hermits of the Church of the East who advanced from Basra into Arabia in the fourth century. The first known name is Mar Odisho, who, at the same time as the founding of the monastery of al-Hira towards the end of the fourth century, established a hermitage on the island of Bahrain or the island of Failaka. In

Even the earliest Christian sources refer to missionary activity in Arabia. While the Acts of the Apostles (2:11) report that at the Pentecost event the apostles also spoke in Arabic, Church historians such as Eusebius, Rufinus and Theodoret attribute the first missionary work in southern Arabia to the apostle Bartholomew.1 Given that until the fifth/sixth centuries most Church historians frequently confused the Arabian Peninsula with India or Ethiopia, their statements ought to be accepted only cautiously. Despite this uncertainty, the Christian mission to the Arab region may be divided into three geographic areas: first, in the north, the coastal region of the Persian Gulf; second, the interior region, including the important area of Yemen and the oasis of Najran in the south of today’s Saudi Arabia; and, third, the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean to the south of Yemen. It is one of the fascinating aspects of Oriental Christianity that about 200 years before Mohammed it was able to gain a foothold in the future cradle of Islam and there compete with Judaism. In Arabia today, aside from a few dozen Yemeni Jews, there are no longer Jewish or Christian natives.

As the legend of the founding of the first monastery of al-Hira suggests,2 the missionary

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recent decades, archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of several Nestorian monasteries. Among them on the Persian coast of the gulf are the monastery on the island of Kharg, and on the opposite, Arabian, side the following structures: the monastery of al-Kusur on the Kuwaiti island of Failaka; the Church of Akkaz on the Kuwaiti mainland; a church, several hermitages and cemeteries near al-Jubail and Thaj in modern Saudi Arabia; the monastery on the island of Tarut (Darin) in front of the eastern Saudi coast; the monastery on the peninsula of Qatar; the monastery of Marawah on an island belonging to the emirate of Abu Dhabi; and the great monastery and church of al-Khor on the neighbouring island of Sir Bani Yas. Here the triple-naved church, like the similar churches of Marawah, Kharg and al-Kusur, was decorated with numerous Maltese crosses made of stucco. These monasteries and churches flourished between the fifth/sixth centuries and the seventh/ eighth centuries; a few were abandoned, and others, like al-Kusur, were destroyed and used as living quarters. It seems that many Christians were active in trading with pearls, since shah Chosrau I asked Patriarch Ezekiel I (in office 570–582) to investigate the pearl business along the north Arabian Coast. Only the monastery of Kharg was still in operation in the eleventh century.3 Although ecclesiastical documents refer to bishops in Bahrain and Oman, to date hardly any corresponding archaeological discoveries have been made. linked the incense-producing province of Dhofar with Rome and Iran. However, by the start of the Common Era they had already lost the monopoly on maritime trade with India and the East African coast, when Rome learned the secret of the monsoon winds.

In southern Arabia, until the fourth century CE, a triad of gods enjoyed the greatest veneration: the masculine god of the moon, Almaqah; the feminine goddess of the sun, Dhât-Himyam; and their son Athar, the morning star. Late in the third century a turn towards monotheism began in Marib, as expressed in its earliest stage in the numerous stone inscriptions, written in the Sabaean-Himyaritic script, which call exclusively upon the god Almaqah.4 In the second stage, after 384, the god called upon remained nameless and was called simply al-Rahmanan, the Merciful.5 The corresponding Arabic word is al-Rahman

(

) and is in the Koran the first attribute of God. The abandonment of the traditional southern Arabian polytheism in favour of a neutral – that is, neither Jewish nor Christian – monotheism, can be explained in part by the political situation. When the Himyarite Empire united all southern Arabia under its rule towards the end of the third century, the need arose for a religion to transcend the tribal structure. While the traditional deities of southern Arabia were connected to individual tribes, monotheism created the possibility of a generally accessible point of contact between people and the only god, beyond tribal affiliations. Insofar as monotheism is, by definition, both personally accessible and universally valid, it has great unitive power as a state religion. At that time, other rulers undertook similar measures: Shapur II declared Zoroastrianism the state religion, and Aurelian (ruled 270–275) tried unsuccessfully to elevate the sun god Sol Invictus to universal deity. Constantine then succeeded in his choice of Christianity. The Himyarite kings did not choose Christianity because it would have placed them,

Christian communities existed in several places within the Arabian Peninsula, with those of Najran, Mecca and Yemen ranking as the most significant. From 295CE the Himyarite dynasty ruled what is today Yemen, which they governed either from the capital of their homeland Zafar, south of Sana’a, or from the capital of the defeated Sabaeans, Marib, which lay east of Sana’a. Their wealth was based on their control of the incense trade route, which

of God in pre-Islamic stone inscriptions in southern Arabia. A Sabaean-Himyarite inscription from Marib, dating to 499 or 505CE, reports that a house was built with the help of Rahmanan (rhmnn), the compassionate (mthrmn), with Rahmanan being the name of God and the description compassionate his attribute.7 This double characterization of God corresponds precisely to the one that opens the first sura of the Koran: In the name of God, the merciful (al-Rahman, like Ethiopia, under the influence of Rome, but opted instead for a neutral monotheism, and later Judaism.

The Awwam Temple, which has existed since around the sixth century BCE and is today called Mahram Bilqis, in Marib, Yemen. The stone inscriptions from the late third century CE found in the gallery of columns no longer invoke the usual divine triad of moon, sun and Venus but exclusively the god Almaqah, which indicates monotheistic tendencies. Photo: 1980.

A similar, if less clear and later, development emerged in Mecca, the eventual birthplace of the prophet Mohammed, where al-Lah, whose name means the God, was worshipped as the highest god. Al-Lah’s three daughters – the goddesses Manat, time; al-Lat, the sun; and al-Uzza, the morning star – were very popular, as well. The special status of al-Lah is also made evident by the fact that there was no figure of him in the Ka’aba, although it contained 360 idols. This development recalls the proto- monotheism around the god Marilaha that earlier predominated in the region of Edessa.6

), the compassionate (al-Rahim,

). Thus, Mohammed did not invent the opening formula for each sura but used expressions familiar at that time. In it he united the god al-Lah, widely regarded in the central Arabian Hejaz as the highest god, with Rahmanan, worshipped as the

We can also find the second Islamic attribute

only god in southern Arabia, with the latter transformed into the first attribute of al-Lah. But the word ‘rahmanan’ is the southern Arabian equivalent of the Aramaic ‘rahmana’, which we find in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian versions of the Jewish Talmud and in East Syrian writings such as those of Ephrem.8 Both terms are still used today in both West Syrian and East Syrian literature.

Christianity merely as a matter of form, is disputed; in any case, this first missionary effort in southern Arabia produced little lasting success. Malkîkarib’s son and successor, Abukarib Asad (ruled c.385–420), converted to Judaism after visiting the central Arabian oasis city of Yathrib, later called Medina. Yathrib had been founded by Jewish settlers in the pre-Christian period, and its population swelled considerably after Emperor Hadrian’s defeat of the second Jewish revolt in 135. Although non-Jewish Arabs also lived in the oasis, Yathrib, which was home to several synagogues, could be considered a Jewish city. After his return to Yemen, King Abukarib ordered the first persecution of Christians. The extent to which the rapid expansion of the Mosaic religion in Himyar pressured and stifled Christianity is evident from King Sharabhi al-Yukkûf’s conversion to Judaism around 470, after which he had the Christian missionary Azqir, who had come from Najran, executed because he ‘was spreading a new religion’.10 It appears that Judaism was the leading religion of Himyar from c.400 to 525. On account of the supremacy of Judaism and the fact that monotheistic inscriptions dating from before the end of the Himyar dynasty in 525 do not mention the Trinity, we conclude that they were of Jewish inspiration.

At that time, both Judaism and Christianity were present in southern Arabia. The first documented Christian missionary activity in southern Arabia goes back to Emperor Constantius II (ruled 337–361), who had the deacon Theophilos, who had been born on the island of Socotra, consecrated as bishop, and sent sometime before 356 as an official envoy to southern Arabia and India. The purpose of the mission was mainly of an economic and political nature, as Theophilos was to establish friendly relations with the states bordering the Indian Ocean, in order to counter Shapur II’s policy of expansion and secure the profitable maritime trade with India. This mission was very important for Byzantium because the kingdom of al-Hira, which was a vassal of the Sassanians and bordered on Arabia, controlled the Hejaz to the borders of the Himyarite realm. At the same time, Theophilos, who followed the theology of Arius, was supposed to strengthen diplomatic ties with the ruler of Himyar by having him convert to Christianity and to have churches built for the local Byzantine trading settlements.

In the oasis city of Najran, by contrast, a flourishing Christian community emerged in the fifth century. Although Tabari attributed the undated conversion of the Arabs of Najran, who allegedly worshipped a sacred tree, to the Syrian Fimiun (Euphemion),11 the Chronicle of Seert is more informative. It reports that, at the time of the Sassanian shah Yazdgerd I (ruled 399–420), a merchant from Najran named Hannan, returning from a business trip to Constantinople, stopped in al-Hira and there learned of East Syrian Christianity. Upon his return to Najran he baptized his family and many other occupants of his house, and even made a missionary journey

It is unclear whether Theophilos ever reached India, but he did meet the Himyarite king Tha’rân Yuhanim and his co-regent and son, Malkîkarib. Despite the opposition of the many Jews who lived at court, he received permission to build three churches in the capital city of Zafar, in Sana’a, and in Aden or Hormuz.9 However, they were used only by Christian merchants. Whether the bishop actually succeeded in converting the Himyarite king or whether the king accepted

to Himyar.12 Although the first Christian community of Najran was most likely Nestorian, Justin’s persecution of Miaphysites beginning in 519 resulted in a significant movement of refugees to Najran. Najran became a Christian city of Arabia with several magnificent churches. same time, he had the Byzantine traders, who travelled from Himyar to Ethiopia, plundered and murdered, provoking the first military intervention by the Christian Ethiopians. Although the king had to leave Zafar, he mounted a successful counter-attack in the cold of winter. He returned to his capital, burned the church in which the Christians were imprisoned, and likewise destroyed the Church of Mocha on the Red Sea.

Southern sluice of the coffer-dam of Marib, built in the sixth century BCE. An inscription on a stele from 542CE reports in the name of the Trinity about the repair of the coffer-dam and the construction or renovation of a church.38 Photo: 1993.

In 521, in the person of the Jew Yusuf as’ar Yath’ar (called Masruq in Syriac and Dhu-Nuwas in Arabic, meaning the curly-haired one) the royal throne of the Himyars was occupied by a man who wanted the kingdom of Israel to rise again in Arabia. The conflict between the two monotheistic religions was foreordained when Dhu-Nuwas led the rapidly erupting conflict as a religious war. At the beginning of 522 he attacked the Christians of his realm, to which Najran belonged as a semi-autonomous region. At the

He then led his army northwards and laid siege to Christian Najran in 523 or 524. Although he granted the Christians safe passage after their capitulation, Dhu-Nuwas instigated a terrible bloodbath. He ordered all the clergy, nuns and monks to be burned alive in the cathedral; the leading citizens and merchants, as well as their

families, were beheaded. That the king acted so cruelly out of religious motives is evident from the fact that he promised the Christians their lives if they would accept his religion: ‘Now you [the wives of the beheaded civic leaders] have seen how your husbands were killed because they said that Christ is God and the Son of God. Deny Christ and the cross! Become Jews like us.’13 As another of Dhu-Nuwas’s state­ ments makes clear, he persecuted primarily the Miaphysites because they believed in the single divine nature of Christ: ‘Are you somehow clev­ erer than these Greeks who live among you and call themselves Nestorians?’14 But the Christians remained steadfast, and some 4700 martyrs met with death; 1300 children were sold as slaves.15 Immediately after the massacre, Dhu-Nuwas addressed two letters to the Persian shah and the king of Hira, Mundir III, in which he demanded that they follow his example and destroy the Christians. But Mundir, whose wife was Nesto­ rian, did not consider this and, in fact, informed a Byzantine delegation staying at his court about the incident. construction or renewal of the Church of Marib but also about the complete repair of the dam, which presumably had been severely damaged by an earthquake. It begins with an appeal to the Trinity: ‘Through the power, the glory and the grace of the merciful [al-Rahmanan], his Messiah and the Holy Spirit.’17 But 30 years later the dam finally collapsed; the once fertile region of Marib lost its lifeline and became a barren desert.18 The final destruction of the dam of Marib must have made a significant impression on the people, since one or two generations later the Koran referred to it in words similar to those describing the great flood: ‘But they [the inhabitants of Marib] turned away; then we sent a raging flood against them’ (34:16).

Abraha used his authority to promote Christianity in southern Arabia and had many churches built or rebuilt. The most magnificent church was the Cathedral of Sana’a, which was adorned with murals and mosaics.19 The Muslim historian Tabari reported that in building the cathedral Abraha wanted to supplant the central Arabian trading centre of Mecca as a pilgrimage site, as the Ka’ba was, even in the pre-Islamic period, the most important religious focal point of Arabia. Now the Bedouins were supposed to make an annual pilgrimage to Sana’a rather than Mecca. But the Quraysh, the ruling tribe in Mecca, murdered Abraha’s envoys and engaged a Bedouin to desecrate the cathedral of Sana’a. He is said to have smeared the altar and the cross with faeces in the middle of the night.20 Abraha swore revenge and decided to destroy the Ka’ba. Although Abraha’s army, which had war elephants at its disposal, was far superior to Mecca’s, and on the march to Mecca – around 55221 – it won the first skirmish, it met with an ambush in a narrow valley shortly before reaching its goal and was destroyed. Interestingly, the heroic leader of the Meccans, Sheik Abd al-Muttalib, was none other than Mohammed’s grandfather, with whom the future prophet lived until he was

Christianity becomes the state religion in southern Arabia

But Dhu-Nuwas underestimated the Miaphysite negus of Ethiopia, who burned to avenge the massacre of his garrison of Zafar and his Christian brothers in Najran. Around 525 he landed on the west coast of Yemen with a powerful army, killed Dhu-Nuwas, and imposed Christianity on many Jews,16 after which he placed in power a Himyarite viceroy. After a few years of turmoil, the Miaphysite Ethiopian Abraha seized power around 533, which made Christianity the state religion of southern Arabia for 40 years. The final repair of the great dam of Marib, constructed in the sixth century BCE, took place during Abraha’s reign. A stele dated to the year 542 reports not only about the

eight years old. One can speculate that family pride in the destruction of the Christian army inspired Mohammed, when he felt the call to lead the Arabs away from polytheism, to choose not Christian monotheism but, rather, worship of the highest god of the Ka’aba, al-Lah. Certainly, the national desire to free Arabia from the foreign rule of Ethiopia and Iran constituted a further motivation for the revelation of a new religion. the Arabian realm. It stood under the authority of the metropolitan see of Rew Ardashir.27 On account of its geographical isolation, Christianity held its own for centuries after the conquests of Islam. Marco Polo, who visited the island on his return journey around 1293/1294, reported, ‘The people [of the island] are all baptized, they have an archbishop. The archbishop has nothing to do with the pope in Rome, but is subject to the great archbishop of Baghdad.’28 In the sixteenth century Christianity became blended with Islam and a moon cult; it died out in the early twentieth century. Earlier, around 1800, fanatical Wahabis, the Muslim state sect of Saudi Arabia, had landed on the island and destroyed all the Christian houses of worship.29 Archaeological ruins of a church recall the one-time presence of Nestorian Christians.30

The defeated king Abraha was followed by two of his sons; but around 570 Jewish descendants of Dhu-Nuwas dared to mount an uprising and asked the Sassanian king Chosrau I for military aid. An Iranian army landed in Aden and conquered the weakened Christians. However, instead of allowing the revival of the ancient kingdom of Himyar, the Sassanians made Yemen an Iranian province, where they remained until their expulsion by the Arabs of Mohammed around 630. Presumably the Church of the East used this new conquest to strengthen its presence in southern Arabia. Known by name is the prominent central Arabian tribe of Kinda, which was in part Nestorian.22 There were also a few Christians among the Quraysh, the leading tribe of Mecca. The most famous of these was the scholar and fortune-teller Waraqa ibn Naufal, who was related to Mohammed as the cousin of the prophet’s first wife, Khadija.23 Apparently at that time there was said to be a picture of Mary with Jesus on the wall of the Ka’aba.24 For its part, Abraha’s renowned cathedral of Sana’a remained standing until about 770, when the Arab administrators of Yemen ordered its destruction. Its capitals, decorated with Greek crosses, were reused in the construction of the great mosque.25 The last Nestorian bishop of Yemen with his see in Sana’a, Thomas al-Margarri, served until 850; the Christians there were mentioned for the final time in 911.26

In light of the impressive spread of Christianity in Arabia, it is surprising that there are hardly any hints of a pre-Islamic translation of Holy Scripture into Arabic. The oldest fragments, from the eighth and ninth centuries, come from Palestine and the Sinai.31 First the Nestorian philosopher Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (808–873) translated the Septuagint,32 approximately contemporary are the earliest translations of the Peshitta and the letters of Paul.33 We can only speculate about the reasons for these relatively late translations. Was only Syriac used as a liturgical language at that time? Were most Arab Christians, because of their nomadic lifestyle, illiterate? This reason may have applied in the northern Arabian region and in Yemen, but hardly in Najran. Or have older translations simply vanished without a trace?

The loss of the Arabian dioceses

On account of Islam’s link with the burgeoning Arab nationalism there arose deep in the desert of Arabia a whirlwind of such power that, in a matter of decades, it destroyed the Sassanian

As the traveller to India Cosmas Indicopleustes noted around 525, the diocese on the island of Socotra was the third Nestorian stronghold in

Empire, conquered more than half of the Byzantine Empire and for the first time not only stopped the spread of Christianity but, over time, forced it out of its own birthplace. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Islamic conquest meant the beginning of the decline of Syrian Oriental Christianity, as both the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the East are threatened with extinction in their lands of birth.

There he organized his followers into a socio- religious community under his leadership. This concept of a faith community gathered around a single god, without ties to any tribe, enabled Mohammed to overcome the intra-Arab contra- dictions between settled peoples and nomads, as well as between tribes. In the following years Mohammed extended his power over all of Yathrib, neither shying away from attacking trade caravans from Mecca nor tolerating opposition from other religions. He expelled the Jewish tribe of Banu Qaynuqa from their own city, and he had the leaders of the likewise Jewish Qurayzah executed. Shortly after his death, central Arabia was purged of Jews and Christians. In contrast to Jesus, Zarathustra and Mani, Mohammed was not only the founder of a religion; he was also simultaneously a warrior and a successful statesman. It was precisely this combination of various roles that made Islam suspect to Jews and Christians, since a religious message should succeed on the strength of its truth and with words, not with the sword. In this spirit, a Jew of Palestine stated around 636, ‘Mohammed is a false prophet. Do prophets appear armed from head to toe?’34 In 691 the Nestorian patriarch Henanisho I (in office 685–701) responded similarly when Caliph Abd al-Malik asked him what he thought of Islam. The fearless patriarch answered, ‘It is a power that was established by the sword and not a faith confirmed by divine miracles, like Christianity and like the old law of Moses.’ At first the caliph wanted to cut out the tongue of the courageous patriarch, but then he pardoned Henanisho, on the condition that he never again appear before him.35

The proclamation of the prophet Mohammed (570–632) occurred not in a purely ‘pagan’ environment, since all Arabian cities possessed Jewish and Christian communities of varying size. In addition to the adherents of these two monotheistic religions, there were in Mecca also independent monotheists, called Hanife, who had rejected the worship of the numerous tribal deities and acknowledged only al-Lah as the true God, but were nevertheless neither Christians nor Jews. Mohammed, who was familiar with both religions, latched on to this point. First, he elevated the highest god of Mecca, al-Lah, to the only God, Allah, who tolerated no other gods. Then, following the prophets who preceded him, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, he emphasized that he taught no new religion but, rather, was re-establishing the aniconic worship of the God of Abraham in its original purity. Since God is neither visible nor imaginable, he should not be worshipped with sacrifices and idols but instead with prayer and the proclaiming of his message. Mohammed wanted to cleanse the Ka’aba – whose founding he attributed to Abraham, father of the forefather of all Arabs, Ishmael – of its 360 idols and consecrate it to Allah alone. In this regard, Mohammed was of a similar spirit to Jesus when he purified the Temple (Matt 21:12ff.). Since the Ka’aba was simultaneously a religious and an economic centre, the authorities of Mecca feared that Mohammed’s radical initiative could lessen its attractiveness and undermine its role as a trading hub. In 622 Mohammed fled to Jewish Yathrib.

Although Mohammed proclaimed a universal religion, he remained trapped in the funda- mentals of Hebraic thought. Allah, like the God of Moses, is a righteous, punitive God, who shows mercy only to repentant sinners. Most of the suras expand on the Old Testament idea that God warns his people against disobedience and

The Mosque of Nabi Yunus, which is oriented towards the east, in Mosul, northern Iraq (where the grave of the prophet Jonah is said to be found), was built over the grave of the Nestorian patriarch Henanisho I (in office 685–701). The Christian monastery, founded at the end of the fourth century, was converted into a mosque in the tenth century. In 1349 there was discovered the allegedly uncorrupted body of the patriarch, who had died more than six centuries earlier, which was identified with the prophet Jonah, associated with Nineveh/Mosul.39 The ‘Islamic State’ destroyed the mosque and the tomb on 24 July 2014 with explosives. threatens them with severe punishment. At the same time, divine goodwill correlates with the material success of the faithful – likewise an Old Testament principle, which the spirit of the New Testament diametrically opposes. Besides the refusal of the Arab Jews to recognize Mohammed as prophet, it can presumably also be attributed to the internal resemblance of Islam to the Hebraic religion that the Koran is generally more hostile towards Jews than towards Christians. ‘Among all people, the Jews and the idol worshippers [are] the worst foes of the faithful. And those who say: “We are Christians” are most well disposed towards the faithful’ (5:85). Another sura, however, condemns Christians and Jews with equal severity because they did not believe Mohammed’s revelation: ‘When a book from Allah [the Koran] came to them [Christians and Jews], they rejected it. Allah’s curse be upon the infidels!’ (2:89).

In 630 Mohammed occupied Mecca without a struggle, and there he received many delegations from Arab, including Christian, tribes, who recognized his rule. His successor Abu Bakr (ruled 632–634) explicitly declared Mohammed the final prophet of God, and determined that leaving the Muslim community represented treason against God and that apostasy, as had already been ordered by the Koran, must be punished by death.36 On this point Islam resembled Zoroastrianism. Islamic tolerance limited itself – and still limits itself today in such countries as Iran and Saudi Arabia – to granting Jews and Christians the options of

practising the religion in which they were born or becoming Muslims. Anyone who leaves Islam deserves death.

Among the Christians who rendered homage to Mohammed were not only the Nestorian patriarch Ishoyahb II but also the Christians of Najran, who sent a delegation to Mecca in 631. They subjugated themselves and offered to provide troops in the event of war. Mohammed accepted the subjugation; he imposed two payments of tribute upon them and obliged them to provide military aid. In return he guaranteed the Christians personal security and freedom of worship, as well as protection of the clergy, churches and Church holdings.37 Other Christian tribes, however, such as the Abd al-Qaïs, converted to Islam.38

But the prophet tolerated only Christians and Jews, who belonged to the Peoples of the Book – that is, they relied on a revelation of God made through prophets. After the conquest of Iran, the Zoroastrians were likewise considered a People of the Book, for practical reasons.39 Regarding other religious communities, however, Mohammed was unyielding, and for them there was but one choice: Islam or death. As Allah had revealed to his prophet around 630, ‘And when the forbidden months [a four-month transitional period] are over, then kill the idol worshippers, wherever you meet them. But if they repent and pray and pay the zakat [the tax incumbent on all Muslims], then the way is open to them.’ 40 The first victims of the merciless policy were the Arab polytheists, and later the Buddhists of central Asia and, at times, the Manichaeans.

Muslims. Three years later, Caliph Omar (ruled 634–644) put Mohammed’s wish into action and revoked the pact of Mohammed with the Christians of Najran, whom he had deported mostly to al-Hira, as well as to Syria and Basra. They were, however, permitted to maintain their religion. Towards the end of the eighth century the Miaphysites who had settled in al-Hira were converted by Patriarch Timothy I to the Church of the East, while those in Basra soon converted to Islam, in order to avoid the special tax imposed on Christians.42 After less than a century by Muslim reckoning – that is, beginning in the year 622CE – Arabia had been practically purged of Christians and Jews; small Christian communities continued to exist until the tenth century only along the northern border and in Yemen. When the Arabs advanced to the north as of 632, Syrian and Iraqi Arab Christians also came under great pressure to accept Islam; the remaining Christians were left undisturbed for the moment. A famous exception was the powerful Nestorian tribe of the Arab Taghlib, who refused to betray their faith and were

Jonah is the prophet of Nineveh, which lies in the north-west of the city of Mosul, Iraq. The Bible recounts that God ordered Jonah to travel to Nineveh and threaten the inhabitants with divine judgement. When Jonah fled from God by sea, his ship got into distress, whereupon the crew threw him into the water. However, God sent a whale that swallowed him and spat him up onto the land three days later. Jonah now obeyed and went to Nineveh, where the people repented of their sins and were thus spared by God. Since the Koran adopted this story, it is understandable that both Christians and Muslims honour Jonah.40 (From the manuscript History of the World by Rashid ad-Din, in Tabriz, north- western Iran, written in 1306/1307. Edinburgh University Library. Or Ms 20f 23v.)

The prophet himself ended this initial tolerance towards Christians, however, when, on his deathbed in 632, he recommended that Islam be used specifically for the building up of the Arab nation and that ‘all the infidels be driven from the Arabian Peninsula’.41 Islam was to become the national religion of all Arabs, and Arabia a cosmic mosque, open only to

with the highest authority to their rights. A few of the agreements favourable to the Christians are obvious forgeries, of which the Nestorians, most deeply affected by Islam, were masters. Although sometimes these agreements were not forcefully applied or were made more stringent, their basic structure remained consistent. They defined the status of a church, its rights and duties, and the official limitations upon it. even prepared to pay twice the normal tax on Christians. Several Taghlib leaders paid for their steadfastness with death. [^43]

Between tolerance and oppression – Christians as second-class citizens

The Arabs made up a small minority in the conquered regions and at first withdrew to military encampments. Upon the death of the fourth caliph, Ali (ruled 656–661), General Mu’awiya I (ruled 661–680) seized power, founded the Umayyad dynasty and moved the Islamic capital from Medina to Damascus in the heart of a purely Christian land. For practical and financial reasons, the Umayyads refrained from violently converting non-Arab Christians to Islam. In regions that had previously belonged to Byzantium they often left the Christian administration in office under their command, and in the former Sassanian Empire oppor- tunities for Christians, especially Nestorians, arose in civil government, which had earlier been closed to them. The Miaphysites also benefited from the change in power, since it freed them from the persecutions of the Byzantine authorities.

The prerequisite for these pacts was the organization of the Church of the East, dating from the Sassanian period, into a millet. This political structure was defined by neither territorial nor linguistic criteria but rather by a common creed. Since in the Islamic state the civil law follows immediately from the religious commandments, it cannot apply in its entirety to those of other faiths. Thus, a millet functions like a theocracy: all the faithful are under the

On both sides of the Euphrates, Christians either accepted the Arabs with neutral goodwill or celebrated them as liberators from the Byzantine or Sassanian yoke. As most of the cities surrendered without opposition, religious authorities, such as patriarchs and bishops, negotiated treaties with the Arabs regulating their status. They were all similar and subsumed under the title the Covenant of Omar. Others were said to be traceable to Caliph Ali, highly esteemed by the Shi’ites, or even to the prophet himself. Although the documents extant today date back to a later period, they reflect well the Arab strategy of the time towards their subjects of other religions. Even today, Church commun- ities treasure such documents, since they attest

Bosom of Abraham. Mural in the Monastery of Mar Musa, Syria, twelfth century. The three figures to the front in the bosom of Abraham may also be understood as symbols of the three related religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

jurisdiction of their patriarch, who collects taxes from the civic leaders and bankers of his community on behalf of the Islamic authorities. Since this small, privileged class managed immense sums of money during the first two centuries of Abbasid rule, many opportunities arose for personal enrichment, including, for instance, the leasing of taxes or the sale of high religious offices – i.e. simony. and did not call Mary God-bearer. Second, the Church of the East had for centuries been hierarchically independent of the arch-enemy Byzantium. For this reason, Patriarch Timothy maintained authority over all Christians living within the Abbasid caliphate, which Caliph al-Kaim confirmed for Patriarch Abdisho II (ruled 1074–1090).46 The disadvantage of this far-reaching official authorization was that each patriarchal election required the confirmation of the caliph. The Nestorian patriarch was, on the one hand, the theocratic head of all Christians of the caliphate, which extended from Cairo to Samarqand, and thus one of the most powerful vassals. On the other hand, he was in the end a public servant, whom the caliph could depose.

In this ecclesiastical state, the Nestorian patriarch enjoyed wide-ranging authority until the eleventh/twelfth centuries, as he personally ruled on juridical conflicts within his community and could leave the civil authorities to carry out his judgements.44 Only juristic matters that also concerned Muslims automatically came before a Muslim court, where the testimony of a Christian carried less weight than that of a Muslim, while the punishment of Christians was harsher. In the case of murder, the degree of punishment hinged on the religious affiliation of both perpetrator and victim. If a Muslim killed a Christian, the blood money was only half that paid for a Muslim victim. But, if a Christian killed a Muslim, a death sentence necessarily awaited him. On the other hand, the patriarch was legally responsible for both the good conduct and loyalty of his co-religionists, as well as the demanded volume of taxes. And so the Nestorians constituted a numerically strong but politically weak vassal state.

The authorization by Caliph Muktafi II (ruled 1136–1160) of Patriarch Abdisho III (in office 1138–1148), dating from 1138, reads: ‘The charter of the highest imamate of Islam is hereby granted to you to be the Catholicos of the Nestorian Christians inhabiting the City of Peace [Baghdad] and all the lands of the countries of Islam. You are empowered to act as their head and the head also of the Greeks [Byzantines], Jacobites and Melkites. If any of the above- mentioned clerics [from the Churches named] treads in the path of revolt against your orders or refuses to accept your decisions, he will be prosecuted and punished. Your life and property, as well as that of your people, will be protected, likewise your churches and monasteries. We will be satisfied with your payment of the capitation tax. Be worthy of all these favours and set up prayers and invocations for the Commander of the Faithful.’47 Finally, only the Nestorian patriarch enjoyed the privilege of permission to live in the capital.

The overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) by the Abbasids (750–1258) benefited the Nestorians because the new ruler transferred the seat of government of the Islamic empire from Damascus to Iraq, and in 762 founded the new capital of Baghdad to the north of Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the site of a Nestorian village.45 The Church of the East had two other advantages over other Churches as well. First, of all the Christologies, the Nestorian most closely resembled the Islamic interpretation of Jesus, since it emphasized Christ’s humanity

The civil regulation of the status of Christians and Jews was laid out in principle in the Koran in sura 9:29, upon which also rests the Islamic justification for war: ‘Fight against those of the Peoples of the Book who do not believe in Allah

Serjilla, one of the 300 Dead Cities of northern Syria. The Arab conquest led to the sudden breakdown of trade with Byzantium, the economic collapse of the rich agrarian region and emigration from rural areas. and the Last Judgement, and do not regard as impermissible that which Allah and his prophet have declared impermissible, and do not follow the true creed until they pay tribute of their own free will and acknowledge their subjugation.’ This revelation of Allah divides the world into the so-called Dar al-Islam, the abode of peace, and the Dar al-Harb, the abode of war. In the former region, Islam rules, but in the latter, war, since Islam has not yet been accepted there. Non-Islamic states and societies are fundamentally aims of war, which will be fought as long as they must, until their inhabitants either convert to Islam or subjugate themselves and pay tribute to the Islamic community. From an economic perspective, the demand for the payment of tribute was the motivating force behind Allah’s call for war (Sura 2:216). As soon as Christians, Jews or Zoroastrians were willing to surrender and pay tribute, the war ended, and the relevant civil rights came into effect. the security of their persons, houses and fields, as well as their movable property. They could practise their religion within their community (but not publicly), baptize their own children, marry and bury according to their customs, bequeath their property and keep most of their churches. They were released from military service and thus excluded from the then lucrative service in the officer corps. For this protection, Christians had to pay a special poll tax, depending upon their profession, and a property tax.48 To these were added a tribute in kind from the harvest, as well as additional taxes for the benefit of the Muslim community and support of the tax collectors.49 In rural areas, zimmi who owed taxes but were unable to pay had their children taken and sold as slaves.50 The higher the tax burden became, the greater was the financial incentive to convert to Islam. In order to forestall the danger of a large fall in tax revenues, Iraq’s Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj (in office 694–714) waived the property tax only for Arab Muslims and not for converts or their descendants.51 Thus

Christians had the social rank of protected clients, called zimmi, and the state guaranteed

Mausoleum of John the Baptist in the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, Syria. Originally there stood here a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter, which Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379–395) had converted into the Church of St John at the end of the fourth century. This was changed into a mosque in 705–725 and rebuilt from the ground up in 1893 after a fire. According to popular Islamic religious, eschatological ideas, the victorious Jesus will appear at the Last Judgement on the eastern minaret, the Jesus Minaret, of the Umayyad mosque and kill the Antichrist.41 there emerged a society made up of three classes: Muslims of Arab descent; non-Arab Muslims, called mawali; and non-Arab Peoples of the Book. It was discrim-ination against the mawali that triggered the Abbasid revolution in 750 and transformed the Arab empire into an Islamic empire. desertification of entire provinces. In the case of Syria and Palestine the once flourishing trade with the Christian states of the Mediterranean also came to a standstill, depriving the cities of their economic base. And so agricultural regions in Syria, Palestine and Iraq became pastureland, and the famous ‘Dead Cities’ appeared in northern Syria, where sheep and goats graze among the ruins and churches are used as stables.

In certain parts of the Dar al-Islam, the combination of a weak central authority and a careless exploitation of the non-Muslim, rural population by arbitrary taxation and bands of nomadic robbers led to an irreversible collapse of rural agrarian regions. The impoverished and highly indebted farmers abandoned their fields and olive groves, which the Bedouins who took them over left fallow, leading to the decline of agriculture, to depopulation and, finally, to the

Along with the basic fiscal regulations, there were a series of restrictions, concerning public life in particular. First, numerous cathedrals and churches were converted into mosques, as the basic structure of the great mosques of Damascus, Aleppo, Diyarbakir and Mosul attests, or new mosques were built from the materials of destroyed churches. Second, the conversion of

Muslims was strictly forbidden, likewise apostasy from Islam. Still today, in some Islamic countries such acts are considered capital crimes, punish- able by death. Additionally, no Christian man was permitted to marry a Muslim woman; the reverse case was allowed, as long as the children were Muslim. No Christian could be prevented by his or her relatives from converting to Islam. on the Christians, the situation eased for the Christians until the third Abbasid caliph, al-Mahdi (ruled 775–785), who placed new emphasis on the discriminatory measures following a few military defeats by Byzantium. Then in 850 Caliph Mutawakkil (ruled 847–861) intensified them still further, not least in order to break the increasing social influence of the Nestorians. Christians now had to wear yellow coats and mark their head coverings with two special buttons. Women also had to conceal their faces with yellow veils. They were not permitted in the market on Friday, and their children were not allowed to learn Arabic in school. All Christian and Jewish civil servants, even if they were merely scribes, had to accept Islam, or they would be released. Furthermore, ‘wooden figures depicting the devil had to be placed on the doors of their houses’. Finally, Christians had to make the graves of their dead level with the ground.55 In light of the rules governing the clothing of Christians in public, one cannot escape the conclusion that the tragic Jewish star did not originate in Europe but, rather, in the Islamic caliphate of the Abbasids.56 Mutawakkil’s regulations brought an end to the first period of flourishing for the Church of the East, which lasted from c.780 to 847. Although these measures were not always and everywhere enforced to the same degree, there is no doubt that the Christians lived in a social ghetto. With the exception of doctors, scholars and translators, the Nestorians were excluded from political, military and socially relevant life. It is worth considering that some of these discriminatory policies against those of other religions remain in effect even in the twenty-first century in a few Middle Eastern countries.

The following types of conduct were also forbidden or imposed upon Christians. Every Muslim is to be granted three days’ shelter and care in the churches (!) free of charge. No new churches, monasteries or hermitages may be built, and their renovation or repair is also forbidden.52 Processions outside the church and the public display of the cross, images and figures are forbidden, likewise the reading of the Koran. Every act of worship, including funerals, must be quiet, and the simandron may only be struck quietly within the church. Christians may not gather in a quarter inhabited by Muslims, and when encountering a Muslim in the street must stop respectfully. No Christian house may be taller than neighbouring Muslim houses. Christians may not carry swords or ride horses, but only asses and mules; the use of saddles is either generally forbidden or permitted only in the case of wooden saddles. They may not walk down the middle of the street but only to the sides. It is forbidden for Christians to give their children typically Muslim names and sometimes even to use the Arabic script.53 It is forbidden for Christians to clothe themselves like Muslims; they must wear a distinguishing belt and shave the front portion of their heads. Clothing worn in public must be marked front and back with a yellow piece of cloth. Anyone who disregards these laws will be killed or his family will be sold into slavery or he will become a Muslim.54

In a certain sense, the Arab conquest of the Middle East gave the Church of the East an advantage, since it paved the way for Nestorian monks and missionaries to return to the former Byzantine regions west of the Euphrates.

After the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj (in office 694–714) and Caliph Omar II (ruled 717–720) first fully imposed these discriminatory measures and increased the financial pressure

Nestorian dioceses were established in Damascus, Aleppo, Edessa, Mopsuestia, Tarsus, Melitane, Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria, and on Cyprus; Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria were later elevated to metropolitan sees. Nestorian monks could now visit the Coptic monks of Egypt without hindrance and found several monasteries in Palestine.57 Under the Fatimid Shi’ite caliph al-Aziz (ruled 975–996), who ruled over Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, a Nestorian served as vizier, who in this capacity administered the entire realm. His name, Isa Ibn-Nastur, means literally ‘Jesus, son of Nestorius’.58 The caliph’s death brought to an end a two-decade period of great tolerance, which had enabled the Nestorians to build numerous new churches. Like the Nestorian catholicoi, Isa Ibn-Nastur also emphasized the great distance of the Church of the East from the Roman-Byzantine Church and suggested its purported closeness to Islam.59 Al-Aziz’s son and successor, al-Hakim (ruled 996–1021), however, distinguished himself through unbounded fanaticism. He had Isa Ibn-Nastur murdered in 1002 and mercilessly persecuted the Christians. Both the twelfth-century Nestorian historian Mari ibn Suleiman and Bar Hebraeus reported, ‘The Christians of Egypt and Syria [Palestine] were persecuted; they had to wear a wooden cross of five pounds weight around their necks, and a large number became Muslims.’60 When al-Hakim declared himself the incarnation of God, he was murdered. Both the Sunnis and the Shi’ites consider him a deranged blasphemer; the Druzes, however, who live in Lebanon and Syria, regard him as their ‘hidden’ imam. destroyed, the Nestorians suffered no further out-and-out persecutions, ‘merely’ social discrimination. There were hardly any official efforts to force conversion. While the Umayyad Empire was characterized by the Arabs and an Arab spirit, the early Abbasids were much more internationally oriented, which benefited educated Christians. Individual doctors, scholars, poets, translators and merchants even achieved great respect and wealth. On the other hand, the Church was, as before, strictly forbidden from undertaking missionary efforts among adherents of the state religion. The potential for growth in the Abbasid Empire was much smaller than under the Sassanians, since there were no longer any polytheists to convert. Additionally, the Sassanians had on occasion tacitly tolerated the conversion to Christianity of simple people such as farmers and artisans, while the Islamic authorities consistently punished every instance of apostasy. This strict forbidding of missionary activity was not the least motivation for the Nestorians to send missionaries to the Far East.

The long-term prospects of the Nestorians, however, were gloomy, for four reasons. First, financial and social incentives tempted Christians to convert to Islam. Second, conversion to Islam, which shared the Hebraic heritage with Christianity and acknowledged Jesus as a prophet, was infinitely easier than the earlier conversion to Zoroastrianism. One also ought not overlook the fact that, upon the initial confrontation with Islam, not a few Christians questioned whether it represented another heretical Christian (or Jewish) sect or if Mohammed might not really be the promised paraclete.61 Only the consistent rejection of the Eucharist, the cross and religious images convinced them otherwise. Third, Islam is a down-to-earth religion with a simple, compre- hensible creed. It has no hard-to-grasp concepts but, rather, limits itself to placing achievable demands for conduct on its adherents. Fourth,

Over the short and middle term, the shift in power from the Sassanians to the Muslims had a positive effect on the Church of the East. Although under the Christian-hater al-Hajjaj and under the caliphs Umar II, al-Mansur, al-Mahdi and Harun al-Rashid isolated incidents of interference occurred and some churches were

the churches remained at the mercy of the ruler of the moment, and the Christians helpless against the greedy tax collectors.

Zakha (in office 714–728).64 During this time, Arabic replaced Syriac as the vernacular language of the Nestorians of Mesopotamia; under Patriarch Elias I (in office 1028–1049) Arabic also became the legal language for Christians, although Syriac remained the liturgical language.65

The heyday of the Church of the East under Patriarch Timothy I

With Timothy I (780–823), a personality extraordinary in many regards assumed the patriarchal throne. He guided the Church under five caliphs for more than four decades; not only was he an important writer, corresponding extensively with his bishops, but he was also distinguished by great missionary zeal and displayed remarkable diplomatic abilities in dealing with the civil authorities. Under his leadership, the Church of the East achieved a brilliant highpoint at a time when Christians presumably constituted about 40 per cent of the Mesopotamian population. At first, his initial year in office did not bode well, as he won the patriarchal election thanks to intrigue and trickery. On the eve of the election he showed the electors bulging sacks of money and suggested that they would be richly rewarded for his election. However, after his successful election, the money bags were revealed to be full of stones, and Timothy rebuked the electors: ‘The priesthood is not to be sold for money.’66 Then one of the losing candidates, Metropolitan Joseph of Merv, slandered the patriarch before Caliph al-Mahdi, accusing him of being a sympathizer with Byzantium. But al-Mahdi did not act on the slander, whereupon the disappointed metropolitan converted to Islam.67 When in 781 the highest-ranking metropolitan of the Church, Ephrem of Gondeshapur, who likewise had campaigned for the patriarchal office, went into schism with other bishops, the powerful Nestorian personal physician of Caliph Isa al- Quraisch reconciled the two prelates.68

The process of changing power from the Sassanians to the Arabs lasted for more than a century and brought difficulties to the Church of the East. Seleucia-Ctesiphon fell in 637, but the province of Fars not until 649, which caused the patriarch, which lived in modern Iraq, to lose contact with and control over the dioceses of southern Iran, who traditionally sought independence. In fact, after the re-establishment of imperial unity, the metropolitan of Rew Ardashir, Shimun and his 18 bishops refused to recognize the authority of Patriarch Ishoyahb III (in office 650–660). They argued that Rew Ardashir had received the Good News from the apostle Thomas, while Seleucia-Ctesiphon had received it ‘only’ from the student of his student Addai. Thus, the metropolitan of Rew Ardashir could never be subject to the bishop of Seleucia- Ctesiphon.62 But Ishoyahb enjoyed the support of the Arabs; the catholicos removed India from the metropolitanate of Fars and forced the rebellious bishops to surrender. When separatist stirrings began in Qatar as well, he deposed the bishops and mobilized the lower clergy and monks.63 Thus did the patriarch succeed in preserving the unity of the Church.

The Church had to withstand another test when in 692/693 the intriguer John the Leper succeeded, against the will of the bishops, in having himself appointed patriarch, in place of the disgraced Henanisho I, by the Muslim governor of Kufa. After John’s death around 693, Henanisho’s authority was limited to the northern archdioceses; the patriarchal see remained vacant until the election of Saliba-

That the new catholicos was a personage as winning as he was persuasive was made evident in his second year in office, when he not only

persuaded the initially anti-Christian caliph al- Mahdi to have the destroyed churches rebuilt but also engaged in many theological disputations with him. At one such discussion, the caliph asked the patriarch a delicate question, what he thought of Mohammed. Timothy’s reply, flexible in form but unyielding in content, was, ‘Mohammed is worthy of all praise, by all reasonable people. He taught the doctrine of the unity of God and thus walked in the path of the prophets. All prophets separated men from idolatry and polytheism and attached them to God and his cult, so it is obvious that Mohammed walked in the path of the prophets.’69 Although Timothy praised the work of Mohammed, he was on his guard about describing him as prophet – Mohammed was not the paraclete, he merely trod the path of the prophets. When the caliph demanded that he recite the Islam statement of faith, ‘there is no god but God’, the catholicos stated more precisely, ‘I stand by these words and will die with them. I believe in one God in three and three in One, but not in three separate deities, but rather [in the principle] of God, his Word and his Spirit.’70 and the forgiveness of sins, which most closely resemble the actions of God. However, the benevolence shown towards the patriarch did not keep Harun from ordering the destruction of all churches in the region bordering Byzantium in 807 and reinstituting the discriminatory sumptuary laws. A minority of the destroyed churches were rebuilt in the following years.

God moves a mountain for the Christians of Baghdad. The caliph gave the Christians an ultimatum: either move a mountain or accept Islam or be tortured to death. In this regard he appealed to the Gospel of Matthew: ‘If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there, and it will move”’ (Mt 17:20). God raised the prayer of the frightened Christians, and many Muslims are said to have converted to Christianity. (Illustrated manuscript of Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World from 1412. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Ms. fr. 2810, fol. 10v. RCC 18391.)

Caliph Harun al-Rashid posed a still more difficult question: ‘Father of the Christians, tell me in a few words, which religion is, in God’s judgement, the true one?’ If the patriarch named Christianity as the religion most pleasing to God, he would insult Islam; but if he named Islam, he would be an apostate. His diplomatic answer was, ‘That religion that accords with its principles and laws to the actions of God with regard to his creation.’ The caliph admitted defeat and remarked after the discussion ended, ‘By God, he replied in a complete and unim- peachable fashion. He considered his own religion and the principles of his Gospels: love your enemies as you love yourself.’71 The patriarch’s words perfectly summarized the argument of the Nestorian apologists for proof of Christianity’s superiority: only Christianity taught generosity

Under Caliph al-Ma’mun (ruled 813–833), who entrusted the leadership of his new state library to the Nestorian Yuhanna Ibn Massawah, the Church of the East also enjoyed great respect. However, its status remained dependent on the personal views of the caliph then in power, as was made painfully evident under Caliph al-Mutawwakil (ruled 847–861). Earlier, in 837, Caliph al-Mu’tasim (ruled 833–842) built the new capital of Samarra almost 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, since his Turkish mercenaries had outraged the capital’s citizens with their violent behaviour. The chosen location was densely populated by Nestorians and contained eight monasteries.72 First, the caliph bought the monastery of Deir Adi, which he converted into a treasury. The other monasteries and

the Nestorian population had to give way to successive building projects. the edges of the empire, such as Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia in the west and Khorassan (eastern Iran) in the east, declared their independence, reducing Abbasid state authority to the region of Mesopotamia.

But the new capital brought good fortune to neither the caliph nor the patriarch, who relocated there, for the Turkish mercenaries, who had become very powerful, forced Caliph al-Mu’tamid (ruled 870–892) to abandon Samarra in 889 and retreat to Baghdad. [^73] Among the Nestorians, three elderly patriarchs held office within a period of just twelve years. The consequent power vacuum was filled by influential Nestorian physicians, who repre- sented the Church at the theological debates, which were as popular as ever, and effectively led the Church. Thus was repeated the unfortunate development, familiar from the late Sassanian period, in which the patriarchs and their election became playthings of the powerful doctors. Catholicos Theodosius (in office 853–858) was such an example. First, he owed his nomination to the powerful and immeasurably wealthy doctor Bochtisho. But then Bochtisho’s opponents slandered the physician before Caliph al- Mutawwakil, who confiscated his property and imprisoned the hapless patriarch for three years. Mutawwakil’s intensification of discriminatory policies and the removal from office of Christian civil servants also took place during this period.

Under Patriarch Enos I (in office 877–884) the Nestorians benefited from the ‘discovery’ in the state university of the treaty concluded between Mohammed and the delegation from Najran. The vizier Saad ibn-Makhlad, a convert to Islam, was very well disposed towards his former Nestorian brothers in the faith, and put this tolerant policy into effect. [^74] But the revaluation of the Nestorian zimmi raised the ire of the Muslim rabble of Baghdad, who plundered the patriarchal see in 885 and 886. Such anti-Christian unrest arose again in 999, 1021, 1054 and 1055.

In 945 Caliph al-Mustakfi (ruled 945–46) made a desperate attempt to break the power of the Turkish mercenaries and handed over power to the northern Iranian family of the

In the maelstrom of politics

The subsequent centuries witnessed a slow decline of both the Church of the East and the Abbasid caliphate. In the Church, politics and simony in the appointment to high ecclesiastical office played a growing role, while the increasingly arrogant Turkish mercenaries reduced the caliph to a political marionette. Simultaneously, the political unity of the empire collapsed. First, in the interior, the slave revolt of the Zang, which lasted from 869 to 883, shook the foundations of the state, and then several regions lying on

The minaret, modelled after an Assyrian ziggurat, of the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq, near which existed eight Nestorian monasteries.

Buyids. But, by doing so, al-Mustakfi simply traded one evil for another, as the new rulers had him blinded and replaced with one of their own followers. From then on, the caliphate symbolized only the spiritual leadership of the faithful. The period of the Buyids (ruled 945–1055) witnessed the triumph of the Shi’ite branch of the faith, which recognized as rulers only descendants of Mohammed or his son-in-law Ali. Shi’ite dynasties of various types ruled in Egypt, Yemen, Khorassan and northern Mesopotamia, and the Buyids were also Shi’ites. The first 60 years of Buyid rule were quite peaceful for the Nestorians, not least because Emir Adud (ruled 949–983) named the Nestorian Nasr ibn-Harum as his vizier.75 As history has always shown, orderly political circumstances granted the Christians relative security; in the case of power struggles and unrest, they were in danger of becoming scapegoats or targets for the wrath of the people.

In Mesopotamia, however, the Nestorian community slowly diminished – not as the result of brutal persecutions but rather on account of financial burdens, the extortion of protection money, social barriers, juridical discrimination and the enslavement of those unable to pay taxes. The centre of Nestorian life shifted from Baghdad to the northern regions of Mosul and Kurdistan. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Nestorians, like the Jacobites and Melkites, greeted the Mongol khan Hülägü – whose mother Sorqaqtani-Beki and chief wife Dokuz Khatun were both Nestorians – as a liberator. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the Church of the East met with the realistic prospect of being granted status equal to the state religion or itself becoming the state religion.

The preservation of ancient heritage

In the mid-eleventh century Turks again entered Mesopotamia, but this time not as mercenaries but as an entire people. It was the Central Asian Seljuks, whose first leader may have been Christian or Jewish,76 who conquered Baghdad in 1055 and dealt a crushing blow to Byzantium at Manzikert in 1071. Some of the conquerors settled in the vanquished Byzantine region, and the population of Asia Minor changed from purely Christian to purely Muslim. Except for in Istanbul and, to a small degree, Tur Abdin, Christians do not live in Turkey today. The Crusades (1097–1291) also began at this time and profited at first from the rapid splintering of the Seljuk Empire into smaller principalities. For geographical reasons, the Church of the East was barely affected by this. The Crusaders treated the few Nestorians living in the area under their control as heretics, like the Syrian Orthodox, Armenians and Maronites, who ought to be won for the Latin Church. Only the Maronites recognized the authority of Rome, around 1215, and remain united with it.

The eighth and ninth centuries were not only a golden age for the Church of the East but also the developmental period of a new Arab- Iranian culture. The Baghdad of that time was the crucible in which the philosophical and intellectual heritage of Iran, Greece, Syria and India were brought together under the guidance of a cosmopolitan Islam to create a new cultural synthesis. At a time when Europe threatened to sink into barbarism, this new Islamic culture gathered and preserved the treasures of antiquity and then in the twelfth century gave them back to the school of Toledo. Without the curiosity of the youthful Islamic spirit, whose intellectual passion was comparable to that of the European Renaissance, the West would never – or at least only later, when Greek scholars went to Italy after the fall of Byzantium – have found the way to its own forgotten roots. Because Arabic scholars and scientists themselves had no access to the ancient writings and did not know Greek,

they were dependent on the mediation of the Nestorians and Jacobites. In contrast to the Latins, who ignored Greek scholarship, the Syrians devoted themselves to it with a passion, beginning in the sixth century, and translated the Greek texts into Syriac.

The translation of the Septuagint into Arabic by Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (808–873) also took place during this period. Since the founding and financing of a hospital was considered by both Christians and Muslims to be pleasing to God, Baghdad, which had more than a million inhabitants, contained several hospitals, which were often led by Nestorians; in the tenth century every major city of the empire had a hospital. Not only were general practitioners active in these hospitals but also specialists such as surgeons, orthopedists, opthalmologists, dentists, pharmacists and psychiatrists.79

The golden age of the translators coincided with the flourishing of the Nestorian School of Gondeshapur, which Chosrau had elevated to state university.77 The relocation of the imperial capital from Damascus to Baghdad gave a tremendous boost to Nestorian scholarship for two reasons: First, since Gondeshapur was the leading centre of medical teaching in the empire, the caliphs looked to it for their personal physicians. Second, caliphs such as Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun were true cultural patrons and systematically imported Greek manuscripts from Byzantium. The most important lay subjects were Greek and Indian medicine and astronomy, Greek philosophy, mathematics, finance and civil administration. In 832 the University of Baghdad, called the House of Knowledge, supplanted Gondeshapur. According to the ideal of the Greek physician Galen, which held that ‘the good doctor is a good philosopher’,78 the best-known scholars were simultaneously physicians, philosophers and translators. In this way, the Nestorians, together with a few Jacobites, held a quasi-monopoly over this field of study until the tenth century. Even after the appearance of Arab scholars, the Nestorians maintained a leading role until the Mongol conquest of Baghdad.

Individual Nestorian families built true dynasties of doctors, including the Bochtisho, who looked after the health of the caliphs and princes for eight generations. Thanks to their personal closeness to the caliphs, the Bochtisho not only amassed a great fortune but also exercised significant influence over their masters, which they used to the benefit of the Nestorian community. First, in 765 the physician Giwargis Bochtisho, who worked in Gondeshapur, was called to Baghdad, where he cured Caliph al- Mansur. When al-Mansur wanted to give him three young female slaves, he refused to accept them, since Christianity prescribed monogamy. Al-Mansur subsequently appointed the trust- worthy Giwargis to look after his harem. Giwargis’s son Bochtisho and his son Gabriel followed him as palace physicians, with Gabriel becoming a close confidant of Harun al-Rashid. When the caliph announced at an audience held upon his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca that he had prayed to Allah for the protection of his doctor, the Muslim ministers present were angered because Gabriel was not a Muslim. Harun replied, ‘The welfare of the Muslims depends on me and my body and this depends on Gabriel, so their well-being depends on his art and life.’80 That the Nestorian doctors even functioned as pastors for the caliphs is shown by the example of the physician Salmawayh ibn

The translations were usually made from Greek into Syriac and then, in a second step, into Arabic, with over 50 Syrian translators active in Baghdad alone at the time of Timothy. Thanks to this effort, which was encouraged by the caliphs, the Arab world had access to the works of the Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, the physicians Galen and Hippocrates, and the mathematicians Euclid and Ptolemy.

Banan, of whom Caliph al-Mu’tasim said, ‘My doctor Salmawayh is more important to me than the highest judge, for the latter cares only about my property, while the former concerns himself with my soul.’81

Arabic vocabulary. Hunayn was also head of the state library and received the title prince of the translators.83

A famous episode from Hunayn’s life indicates that at that time the Nestorians were certainly familiar with pictorial representations.84 In 854 a few people who were jealous of Hunayn accused him in the presence of the patriarch and the caliph of being, like other Christians, an idol- worshipper, because he had commissioned the icon of the Virgin Mary that was present. As evidence against this claim, they demanded he spat on the icon. Since Hunayn feared that the anti-Christian caliph al-Mutawakkil could accuse the Christians in general of idol worship, he gave in and spit on the icon. But the reaction of the Muslim caliph, whose religion included an absolute prohibition on images of God, was unexpected. He was so upset with this impiety that he threw Hunayn in prison and confiscated both his fortune and his private library. The patriarch excommunicated him on the spot. After six months of Hunayn’s imprisonment the caliph became very ill, whereupon Christ appeared to him at night in a dream and ordered him to pardon Hunayn; he would then cure him. In fact, al-Mutawakkil released him and demanded that his accusers pay Hunayn a large amount in damages, which he himself doubled. He then returned him to his office in all honour and returned to him his fortune and his valuable library.85

As the personal physician of Mutawakkil, Gabriel’s son Bochtisho accumulated an unimag- inably large fortune and went about only in a carriage made of ivory. Bochtisho’s pointedly flaunted wealth angered even the caliph. When the doctor was drawn into the intra-Church conflict over Patriarch Theodosius, Mutawakkil was incensed, since he had grown weary of the ongoing arguments between the Nestorian factions. He had the patriarch arrested, expelled the Nestorian clergy from his capital Samarra, destroyed their churches and monasteries, and reinstated and intensified the discriminatory laws. At the same time, the irate caliph confiscated Bochtisho’s fortune and sent him into exile in Bahrein, where Baghdad’s one-time richest private citizen died a beggar in 870.82 Boshtisho’s son Yuhanna cared for Caliph al-Mu’tamid (ruled 870–892) and became upon the caliph’s death the metropolitan of Nisibis. The last physician of the family of Bochtisho, Saïd, died in 1058. Another famous family of doctors were the Massawahs, from whom came Yuhanna (†857), the first head of the state university of Baghdad, whose library held over one million manuscripts.

The best-known and most productive Nestorian scholar was the Arab from al-Hira, Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (808–873). Hunayn was not only leader of Mutawakkil’s court physicians and a leading scholar in the fields of medicine, especially ophthalmology, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, mathematics and philosophy, but also the best translator. In his translation work he proceeded according to modern methods, in that, prior to the translation, he gathered as many different texts as possible, in order to create the ideal starting point. Finally, he contributed to the development of a scientific

The extensive work of the Nestorian translators, addressed to a broad public, created an enormous demand for a suitable medium on which to write. This was no longer parchment but paper, which had developed originally in China. Paper was discovered at the time of the early Han Dynasty (202BCE–9CE) and improved by the courtier Cai Lun around 105CE. In the early eighth century it reached the city of Samarqand, which had been conquered by the Arabs.86 From there the art of paper-making reached Baghdad in 793,

The Church of the East and Islam and eventually the whole of the Mediterranean region. Beginning in the ninth century the Suq al-Warraqin, the paper-dealers’ market, flourished in Baghdad, where over 100 paper shops offered sheets of paper. There interested people also found book dealers with the latest works, antiquarian book shops and professional copyists.87

The young Mohammed is said to have been recognized as prophet first by a Christian monk, long before he himself perceived his task. Both Mohammed’s biographer Ibn Ishaq and the historian Tabari recounted this tradition.89 When Mohammed was nine or twelve years old, his uncle Abu Talib took him along on a trading journey to Syria. The caravan rested in the Byzantine city of Bosra, where the Nestorian monk Nestorius,90 called Bahira by the Arabs, lived in a cell near a large hall church. Bahira saw from his cell how a single isolated cloud accompanied the caravan, casting a shadow only on Mohammed. He then invited the caravan to a meal. The monk questioned the boy and examined his body. When he saw on his back the sign of prophethood he said to Abu Talib, ‘Take your nephew back to his homeland and guard him from the Jews; if they recognize him, they will do evil to him. Great things will come of your nephew.’91 The fact that in the Islamic tradition the Christian monk vouches for the authenticity of Mohammed’s prophecy shows that early Islam sought a close connection with Christianity and, simultaneously, a sharp distinction from the Judaism of the time.

The works of Greek scholarship translated into Arabic by the Nestorians found their way to the caliphate of Cordoba, founded in 756, to which belonged the Andalusian city of Toledo. After it was conquered by the Christian king Alfons VI of Castile around 1085, Christian, Arab and Jewish scholars there began to work with the Arabic documents and translate them into Latin. Towards the end of the twelfth century the rediscovery of Greek scholarship advanced to Sicily and Constantinople and then in the thirteenth century to Central Europe. The extent to which university activity in Western Europe was limited and censored by the Church is shown by the statutes of the University of Paris, composed in 1215 by Cardinal Robert of Courçon: they forbade students and professors from reading works in metaphysics, physics and all the natural sciences.88 But other, more cosmopolitan spirits, such as Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), undertook the attempt to reconcile the Christian revelation with the Greek primacy of reason. Later, in the Renaissance, the purely rational approach of the natural sciences broke free of the chains of theology.

It is conceivable that Mohammed, who was active for years as a trader, may have travelled to Syria and become familiar with Christianity there. He must also have been confronted with Christianity in his contacts with Christian Arabs – whether they came from al-Hira, Najran or his own area. It appears that Mohammed was aware of both Tatian’s Diatessaron and the Gospel of Thomas.92 Presumably he was most familiar with Miaphysite Christianity and least so with Nestorianism. Mohammed acknowledged Jesus not only as a prophet, called Naby in Arabic, but also as a messenger of God, as Rassul. God revealed a message to Jesus, but the Jews rejected it and him, and the Christians adulterated this

The contribution of the Nestorian, Jacobite and Melkite translators of Mesopotamia was twofold. First, they built a bridge to the West and renewed Western philosophy and science. Second, they enabled the further development of Islamic scholarship, which led to a synthesis of Muslim thought and Greek science and philosophy, as can be seen in the work of Ibn Sina (980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198).

message into the New Testament (Koran, Sura 2:87ff.). For this reason, there could be for Mohammed no conflict in the content of the Old Testament, the true message of Jesus, and the Koran revealed to him, since God’s revelation is always the same. Mohammed never criticized Jesus, only the Jews who denied him and the Christians who distorted his message. which he understood as a kind of family-like tritheism. ‘O People of the Book [Christians], do not exaggerate in your faith. The messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah. Do not say, “Three.” Desist. Allah is but One God’ (4:171). The Koran categorically rejects an incarnation of God. In Sura 5, God speaks to his messenger Jesus, ‘And if Allah says: O Jesus, son of Mary, have you said to the people, “Accept me and my mother as two deities beside Allah”? he will answer, “You are holy. I could never say that, for I have no right”’ (5:119). In Islam only the revealed message is important, not the messenger, for he is only the mouthpiece of God, not God. Mohammed’s view of the Trinity as a kind of divine triad shows that the above- mentioned Montanists or ideas from the folk religions of Arab tribes were his source in this regard.93 Like Nestorius, Mohammed rejected the worship of Mary but not her veneration.

The Nestorian monk Nestorius, called Bahira by the Arabs, was the first to recognize that the twelve-year- old Mohammed, whom an angel from heaven is anointing, would be the heralded prophet. Nestorius (Bahira) gestures from the tower window towards Mohammed; his uncle Abu Talib bows before him. From the manuscript History of the World by Rashid ad-Din, in Tabriz, northwestern Iran, written in 1306/1307. (Edinburgh University Library. Or Ms 20f 43v.)

For Mohammed, Jesus is not the son of God in an ontological sense but only metaphorically, at best; he is not God but rather God’s servant. ‘All praise is due to Allah, who sent his book down to His servant [Jesus]. And thus are warned all who say, “Allah provided himself with a son’’’ (18:1–4). In another sura, Jesus says of himself, ‘I am a servant of Allah, He gave me the book and made me a prophet’ (19:30). Mohammed’s strict monotheism forced him to deny the divinity of Christ, since otherwise he would have had to have accepted the concept of the Trinity,

Since Jesus was, in Mohammed’s view, not God, he must be, like Adam, a temporal, mortal man (3:59; 19:33ff). Nevertheless, the prophet rejected the idea of the crucifixion. ‘And on account of their [the Jews’] talk, “We have killed the messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah”; while they neither killed him nor subjected him to death by crucifixion, rather he appeared to them only like [a crucified one]; and those who disagree on this matter are truly in doubt about it; they have no news of it but instead follow mere conjecture, and they have no certainty’ (4:157). Islamic exegetes tried to resolve the question of Jesus’s death: either Jesus was only apparently crucified, or another man was crucified in his place. It was speculated in this regard whether an unwilling person was seized or a Jewish leader or even Judas himself, or whether one of Jesus’s disciples freely volunteered. Tabari supported the second view, according to which God removed Jesus before the crucifixion and granted his appearance to Joshua, a Jew who was present, so that he suffered death on the cross.94 in their everyday lives; heathenism, by contrast, is ignorance, and sin is the conscious refusal to obey God’s message.

And how did the Church of the East react theologically to the Islamic challenge? After the initial uncertainty about whether Islam was simply another Jewish sect, the ideas emerged that either it represented a Christian heresy, or the ‘good’ parts of the Koran were inspired by Christianity. In both cases the monk Bahira, known from the Islamic tradition, was the relevant source. In this spirit, the ninth-century Nestorian apologist Abd al-Masib Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi wrote that the monk Nestorius, alias Bahira, led Mohammed away from polytheism to monotheism and dictated to him a Koran which agreed with the Gospels. During Mohammed’s later stay in Medina, the Jews compelled him to rewrite the Koran.96 The Nestorian Apocalypse of Bahira, likewise from the ninth century, no longer assigns fault for the shortcomings of the Koran to the Jews but instead holds responsible Bahira himself, who humbly regrets his errors: ‘O how wrong I was when I left my cell and came to this barren desert. I have planted bad seeds there, which will remain there until Judgement Day. I elevated vanity to truth, made possible the impossible, and set ravening wolves, vipers and wild animals upon the lambs of Christ. I set a violent and cruel people upon a peaceable people.’97

It is clear that Mohammed, with his denial of the crucifixion of Jesus and rejection of the worship of Mary, primarily opposed the Miaphysites. On the other hand, Nestorian theology was relatively close to Islam, insofar as it rejected the Theopaschite death of the divinity of Jesus and the divinization of Mary as Theotokos. In this spirit, the Muslim theologian al-Dimaschqi (1256–1327) stated, ‘What a splendid man is Nestorius, who said, I deny a God who lived in a mother’s womb.’95 Likewise, the Church of the East and the Koran both reject original sin. However, the Koran goes a decisive step farther in this regard, as it also denies the saving work of Christ. From the perspective of the Koran, God redeems humanity by revealing himself in his message and freeing the faithful from ignorance. ‘Salvation’ so understood is knowledge accepted by the people and lived out

The Nestorian literature of the debate developed on three levels. First, proving the superiority of Christianity, and, second, closely related to the first, identifying the weaknesses of Islam. However, the Nestorian apologists had to avoid attacking Islam head-on or insulting the prophet. Third, they tried to explain ideas incomprehensible to Islam, such as the Trinity and the two-nature doctrine of Christ.98

The famous Book of the Tower listed six arguments for the superiority of Christianity.99 First, Christ, unlike Mohammed, had performed

miracles and thus presented divine signs to illuminate for the people the way to the Good News. However, since the resurrection of Christ no more miracles occurred. The Nestorian Ammar al-Basri (†845) explained the disappear- ance of miracles by stating that with his gospel Jesus left with the people an eternal miracle, and that it was more commendable for the faithful to live rationally according to the gospel than on the basis of miracles, which appeal only to the physical senses.100

As Hunayn Ibn Ishaq emphasized, Christianity is, fourth, rational and free of contradictions. For, although the apostles were uneducated, Christianity was also accepted by the Greek philosophers – for the Nestorians, like the Arabs, the standard for all scholarship.103 The fifth argument points out that all the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in Christianity; and the sixth cites the willingness of the martyrs to sacrifice themselves. In this regard, al-Kindi underlined the fact that only defenceless, pacifist witnesses to the faith were true martyrs, not those, like the Islamic warriors, who fell in battle.104

Second, Christianity is superior to the other monotheistic religions for ethical reasons, as it is the only religion that teaches those principles that correspond to God’s relationship to his creatures. This argument, used by Patriarch Timothy in his debate with Caliph Harun, is based on the idea of the three divine laws. The present patriarch, Mar Dinkha IV, explains them this way: ‘From Creation to Moses, God gave the law of reason, so that the people of this period were judged according to the unwritten law of their own conscience.’ However, other thinkers, such as al-Kindi, interpreted this law negatively as the law of violence and of the stronger, with Mohammed falling into this category. ‘With Moses the epoch of the second law, of justice, began; the people will be judged on Judgement Day according to the Ten Commandments. The third period, which will last until the Last Judgement, was initiated by Jesus Christ, as he gave the law of grace and forgiveness.’101 Only Christianity teaches the law of grace, while Judaism is founded on the Mosaic Law and Islam, depending on the interpretation, on the first or second law.

The Nestorian apologists then cited five incorrect reasons why a religion would be chosen by people. Islam was always the primary target in the sights of the fiercest apologists, such as al-Basri and al-Kindi. The first, most important reason concerned violence. As Patriarch Henanisho had earlier explained to Caliph Abd al-Malik, a religion that established itself with the sword cannot be true, since this action entirely ignored the non-violence demanded by God.105 Christianity, however, had triumphed not with the sword but rather against the sword of the Roman and Sassanian persecutions. So it was easy for al-Kindi to demonstrate that Mohammed was victorious in the first place thanks to his bands of robbers and successful military campaigns. The Arabs accepted Islam not on account of its religious message but ‘either out of fear of the sword or out of greed for power and spoils’.106 Allah’s order to the desert Arabs that they participate in the wars of conquest (48:16) corresponds to Sura 4, which unambiguously places warriors above non-combatants: ‘Allah grants a higher rank to those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their blood than to those who sit idle. Allah promises good to all [the faithful] but he elevates those who strive and fight above those who sit idle’ (4:95). The door to paradise was opened to anyone who fell in the religious war:

Third, Christianity is the only universal religion. While Judaism applies only to the Jews and the Koran primarily to the Arabs, the Good News is addressed to all people, regardless of race or nationality. In contrast to early Islam, which forbade the translation of the Koran, the Gospels were translated into many languages.102

‘And those who are killed on Allah’s path, [He] will lead to paradise’ (47:4ff.). For the Christians, however, the so-called Holy Wars of the expansionist Muslims were nothing more than religiously legitimated Bedouin robber raids, carried out on a large scale.107 many nuances for concrete items such as swords, camels, horses, etc., but few abstract terms. The affected language of the Koran was also far removed from that of Arabic poetry, which was recognized as superior.110

To the Islamic accusation that veneration of the cross was nothing but idol worship, Metropolitan Odisho of Nisibis replied that the sign of the cross is a sacrament; it is the Christian way of opening oneself to divine grace. The cross also showed the direction for prayer, analogous to the Muslim qibla. Al-Basri added that by venerating the cross the believer honoured the Creator, since the crucified one was ‘God’s veil’, with which He revealed himself to us.111 With these words al-Basri continued the traditional idea that Jesus Christ was both the Revealer of the glory of God and his impene- trable veil. Al-Kindi added in this regard that the cross did not represent idol worship, but the pilgrimage to Mecca and its associated rituals did, as they were founded on the cult of the pre-Islamic sun worshippers.112 Al-Basri also defended the sacrament of baptism against the derision of the Muslims. First he referred to the great significance of ritual washing in Islam, and then he defined baptism as the ‘symbolic understanding’ of the resurrection of Christ. ‘We ought to remember that we, too, will rise from the grave, as He arose.’113 Then al-Basri explained the significance of the crucifixion and addressed the Muslims directly: ‘God’s grace and blessing [were revealed] in the crucifixion of Christ. O mortal man, instead of being grateful, you have fallen into unbelief and polemic.’114 The crucifixion served to relieve creatures of the fear of death, or at least ease such fear. For al-Basri, God had intentionally displayed Christ’s death and resurrection openly. In this way, people were to recognize that they would one day be resurrected just as Christ, who shared their nature, had been. In this regard, celebration of the Eucharist served to remind the faithful not only with words but

Al-Kindi and al-Basri cited as the second incorrect reason to accept a religion is an easy morality and the promise of blissful sensual pleasures in paradise. Here the two apologists referred first to Islamic polygamy and the ease of divorcing a wife, while Christianity, by contrast, demanded monogamy and permitted divorce only in exceptional cases. Second, they sneered at the very earthly rewards that pious Muslims expected in paradise, such as beautiful virgins, streams, milk and honey, etc. Mohammed had promised such base sensual pleasures in order to dazzle the uneducated and poor Bedouins. Ibn Sina also had to admit that the pleasures of paradise promised by the prophet were to be understood symbolically, as they would be of a spiritual nature.108 Al-Kindi traced these serious defects of Islam back to the personality of Mohammed: ‘He loved too dearly war, money and women [Mohammed had nine wives and at least six concubines] to be able to claim to be God’s messenger.’ Mohammed was so absorbed in his war-making, his wives and the conflicts among his wives that he had neither the time nor the energy to pray and think about God.109

For al-Basri, precisely one of the chief strengths of Islam, namely its simple dogma, was another reason to doubt its truth. Then al-Basri listed two further incorrect reasons for conversion to Islam: pan-Arab nationalism and the hope for financial or material gain. Finally, al-Kindi directly attacked the Koran: it contained contradictions and was poorly constructed. In fact, the suras are ordered not according to their content or their date of appearance but only on the basis of their length. Additionally, Arabic was unsuited for a religious book, since its vocabulary included

also materially of the possibility of resurrection and eternal life.115 their conclusions on these observations, later authors repeated like prayer wheels that the Church of the East had systematically rejected the veneration of images.120 In fact, the modern East Syrian churches offer a spartan atmosphere, with a bare cross the only figurative element in the interior and no pictures to be seen. The only exceptions are found in small mountain chapels in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan, where occasionally a small, modern wall hanging with a depiction of Christ or a saint may be seen. But was it always so?

With regard to the question of circumcision, the Nestorians appear to have surrendered to the pressure of their Muslim environment, as Metropolitan Elias of Nisibis (975–1046) boasted that ‘we follow the actions of our Lord and his holy apostles by practicing circumcision’.116 With these words, Elias responded to the claim that the Christians did not follow Jesus, who had been circumcised.

Since Islam and Christianity represented fundamentally different values in so many cases, although dialogue on topics of religion and religious anthropology were possible, they hardly ever bore fruit on either side. Excepted from this rule is the exchange of ideas, mentioned above, in the realms of philosophy117 and science, a possible inspiration for the Islamic mysticism of al-Hallaj (858–922) and for Sufism, as well as the syncretistic religion of the Nusayri-Alawis. The religion of the Alawis, which spread primarily in Syria and Lebanon, was originally a Shi’ite sect, which adopted many elements of Christianity and Gnosticism in the ninth century.118

Early Christianity, like early Buddhism, was without images; it followed the Mosaic Law: You shall not make for yourself an idol.121 But Judaism included rare exceptions, of which the murals, dating from between 243 and 254CE, of the synagogue of Dura-Europos, which lay on the western bank of the Euphrates, are the most famous.122 The first to produce pictures of Christ was the Gnostic sect of the Carpocratians, but they were deemed heretical.123 Within the orthodox community, pictorial art developed in three stages: First, towards the end of the second century, an allegorical symbolism emerged, in which animals and objects such as the lamb, the dove, the fish, the vine and the anchor referred to symbolically suggested figures. Then the first depictions of people appeared around the mid- third century in the catacombs, where Old and New Testament figures and the Good Shepherd could be seen on the walls. The murals of the Christian chapel of Dura-Europos date from the same period. Here we find mostly New Testament scenes, such as the Good Shepherd, Jesus walking on the water, the healing of the cripple and the raising of Lazarus, as well as Adam and Eve and David and Goliath.124 At the beginning of the fourth century the depiction of Christ, the apostles and the saints began to become more widespread; but it remained controversial. Supporters of images, such as the Cappadocian Fathers, argued that pictures helped educate the

Is the Church of the East aniconic?

When in the nineteenth century Anglo-Saxon missionaries reached the Nestorians of Kurdistan, the absence of religious pictures and statues impressed them favourably. In their delight at having discovered unexpected kindred spirits, they labelled the Nestorians Protestants of the Orient. Grant, who arrived in Urmiah in November 1835, opined: ‘Through the whole period of eighteen centuries the Nestorian Christians have remained pure from the defilement of image-worship.’ The Presbyterian Justin Perkins concluded in 1834: ‘Indeed, the Nestorians may, with great propriety, be denominated the Protestants of Asia.’119 Basing

‘spiritually poor’ and referred to an invisible, spiritual reality. In this way, veneration of images passes on to their spiritual model.125 images. However, it is very doubtful whether the veneration of icons developed with the same magnificence and to the same extent as in the Byzantine Empire. As far as the heartland of the church is concerned, the Acts of the Martyrs mention that ‘the decorated churches’ were destroyed by the persecutions of Vahram V in 422.129 However, the decoration referred to could have consisted of crosses and plant motifs, as was discovered in the ruins of a church in al-Hira. More telling is the discovery made by German archaeologists in 1929 at Seleucia-Ctesiphon. In the remains of a church they found a life-size, painted male stucco figure, broken into several pieces. Unfortunately, the head was missing, so we do not know if the statue represented Christ or a saint.130 In any case, this figure, dating to the late sixth century, proves that the Church of the East placed statues in its churches. A fresco fragment from al-Hira, which may show a praying figure, dates from the same period.131

The first general ban on images, however, was issued not in a Christian but in an Islamic state, when Caliph Yazid II (ruled 720–724) forbade religious images in 721. In this regard, he appealed to a hadith, a traditional saying of Mohammed: ‘On the day of resurrection, Allah will punish most severely the makers of images, by demanding of them, “Bring to life what you have created’’.’126 Whoever takes it upon himself to create life as Allah has will be punished with hell.

Only five years later the Byzantine emperor Leo III (ruled 717–741) began to condemn the veneration of icons; in 730 he issued a ban on images. Although the earlier edict of Yazid may have influenced the emperor in his iconoclastic actions, these also arose from intra-Byzantine political motivations. First, he wanted to use the ban on images to weaken the monks, who had become very powerful; and, second, he used his power to support the spread of images of the emperor, in order to demonstrate the authority of the state.127 In the ensuing controversy, the Mandylion, the portrait of Christ painted by the ambassador of King Abgar, served the pro-icon faction as an argument that icons were pleasing to God. Not only had Christ permitted the creation of the painting, but the ailing king had also been cured of leprosy by it. Thus images served as mediators of divine grace.128 The icon controversy ended in 843 with the reinstitution of the veneration of images. From then on sacred images were considered legitimate aids in making the invisible visible.

As the excavation of Samarra near Baghdad, carried out by Ernst Herzfeld between 1911 and 1913, proves, the Nestorians of Mesopotamia had murals. An ancient historian reported on such frescos when he described the palace of al-Mukhtar and praised the ‘wonderful paintings, among them the painting of a church with monks’.132 In a private reception hall, on the fragments of twelve columns, Herzfeld discovered the depictions of four Christian bishops or priests. Above one head was the inscription Miflah the Deacon, which referred to either the cleric portrayed or the painter.133 The paintings, which dated from around 837–839, were carefully removed and hidden in an unused water pipe, presumably when Caliph al-Mutawakkil expelled the Christian clergy from the capital in 850. The great Nestorian church of Famagusta on Cyprus was also decorated with murals and Syriac inscriptions around 1359. Fragments of the Nestorian murals can still be seen in the nave today.134

It appears that the Church of the East was not part of this controversy. Despite the extensive destruction and plundering of Nestorian churches and monasteries, we have enough clues and evidence that the Church of the East was very familiar with the veneration of

Besides the archaeological discoveries, we also have several written sources of evidence that the Nestorian churches of Mesopotamia were decorated with icons and murals. [^135] In the eighth century the theologian Abraham Bar Lipeh testified to the general dissemination of icons: ‘The Eucharist may only be celebrated before a cross, the Gospel, and an icon of our Saviour.’136 Later, Bishop Ishoyahb of Nisibis (†1258) composed a polemic addressed to the Muslims under the title Apology for Images, and around 1340 Amr Ibn Matta likewise defended the veneration of icons. [^137] Finally, a few East Syrian Peshitta Bibles and Gospels from Mesopotamia and Tur Abdin, illustrated with miniatures, have been preserved and show that the Nestorians provided their sacred books with pictures, too. These manuscripts are a stroke of luck, since, over the course of centuries, Turks, Kurds and Catholic missionaries systematically destroyed Nestorian libraries. The ten examples cited by Jules Leroy in his foundational work on Syrian manuscripts with miniatures date from between the sixth and seventeenth centuries. [^138] The miniatures portray figures from the Old and New Testaments, as well as important events from the life of Christ, such as the baptism in the Jordan, Palm Sunday, the foot-washing, the Last Supper, the Resurrection and Pentecost. of Dunhuang, 550 kilometres east of Kocho. The male figure is depicted in the style of a Buddhist bodhisattva, but he wears four crosses: on his headgear, on the collar of his garment, as a pectoral, and he carries in his left hand a long staff ending in a cross; this figure is a Nestorian saint or Christ. [^140]

Then there are the five gold-plated silver platters that were found in southern Siberia between 1909 and 1999. All five came from the valley of Talas in Kyrgyzstan, where silver is mined. Although the platters were crafted in the late Sassanian style, they date from the ninth to tenth centuries. The following motifs are depicted: the crucifixion, the visit of Mary and Mary Magdalene to the tomb and the ascension with Christ; King David; four riders; and twice presumably the siege of Jericho by Joshua. Syriac inscriptions in Estrangela describe the scenes. [^141] Finally, several Nestorian gravestones from the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries were discovered in Quanzhou, the ancient port city of Zaitun on the Yellow Sea. On these were chiselled not only richly decorated crosses and altars but also hovering and seated angels. The winged angels indicate stylistic influences from both the Sassanian reliefs of the great grotto of Taq-e Bostan (Iran, sixth/seventh centuries) and the depiction of Buddhist heavenly messengers, called Apsaras, in Dunhuang. [^142]

Mural from 837/839 from the palace of al-Mukhtar in Samarra, Iraq, portraying a cleric of the Church of the East. Until 1921 the paintings, which were removed between 1911 and 1913, remained packed in crates, in which they were practically all destroyed. [^42]

Archaeological discoveries and many written documents prove that the Nestorians outside Mesopotamia also used pictorial representations. Among the archaeological discoveries is, in the first place, the three murals found by Albert von Le Coq in 1905 in Kocho in north-western China, which were part of a Nestorian church from the seventh/eighth centuries. They portray a priest blessing three of the faithful, another layperson and a rider holding in his right hand a staff topped by a Maltese cross; a cross also appears on his headgear. [^139] Three years later Sir Aurel Stein found a Nestorian painted scroll from the early ninth century in a cave complex

Several documentary witnesses leave no doubt that the Nestorians in China and Mongolia practised the veneration of icons. [^143] The most famous is the stone stele erected in 781 in the Chinese capital of the time, Chang’an, modern Xian. ‘In the twelfth year of Cheng Kuan [638CE] the following edict was issued: The very virtuous [Bishop] Alopen of the land of Ta Qin [eastern Mediterranean region], bringing his sacred books and images from far, has come to offer them at the supreme capital.’144 The text testifies that the Nestorian missionary Alopen, who reached Chang’an in 635, brought with him not only

(Opposite right) Nestorian gravestone from southern China, inscribed in three languages (Syriac, Uigur and Chinese) and two scripts (Syriac and Chinese). It tells of the death of a woman named Elisabeth, wife of the government official Xindu, on 20 May 1317 and of her burial on 25 July 1317.43

religious books but also pictures. At the same time, Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) had a monastery built and ordered that his portrait be painted in the church. Later, in 742, Emperor Xuangzong had the church of Chang’an restored and the portraits of five Tang emperors painted there.145 If the Nestorians had become aniconic, they would not have agreed to this.

(Left) A gilded silver platter from the ninth/tenth centuries, found in the region of Perm, Russia, but most probably made in the valley of the river Talas, Kyrgyzstan. The ascension of Christ is depicted in the upper circle, to the lower left the visit of Mary and Mary Magdalene to the tomb, and to the right the crucifixion. A cross is found in the centre of the platter, in the space below Daniel in the lions’ den, to the upper left two soldiers at the tomb, and to the right, Peter and the cock.44 The platter originated in a Nestorian context. (The State Hermitage Museum,

St Petersburg.)

of Cora wrote around 1330, on the basis of the dubious information of Odoric of Pordenone (1265–1331), who had visited China in 1322, ‘These Nestorians are more than thirty thousand in China. They have very beautiful and orderly churches with crosses and images in honour of God and of the saints.’147

The Nestorians first abandoned the veneration of icons in southern India around the mid- fourteenth century. The Catholic missionary John of Marignolli (†1357) wrote of his stay in Kerala in 1347/1348, ‘The Jews, Muslims and some [Nestorian] Christians regard the Latins as the worst of idolaters because they use statues and images in their churches.’148 At the same time, religious pictures began to disappear from the Nestorian churches of Mesopotamia for several

About half a millennium later the Franciscan Rubruk, who stayed close to the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1253/1254, reported of a Nestorian church, ‘I entered trustingly into the Christian church and saw a very lovely altar. Images of the Saviour, the Holy Virgin, John the Baptist, and two angels were stitched into a cloth woven with gold.’146 For his part, the Latin bishop John

reasons that arose simultaneously. First, beginning in the early fourteenth century, the Church came under severe pressure from Islam, which had been intensified by the conversion of the Mongol Il-Khans of Mesopotamia. Then, between 1384 and 1388, Tamerlane (1336–1405) systematically destroyed all churches and persecuted the Christians of Mesopotamia, who fled from the fertile plains into the mountains of Kurdistan.

In order not to incite the wrath of fanatical Muslims and to avoid plunder and desecration, but also because of their poverty, the ‘mountain Nestorians’ rejected the pictorial decoration of their small chapels. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the Nestorian clergy accepted the interpretation of the Protestant missionaries and claimed that their Church had always been aniconic.

(Left) An angel announces the resurrection of Christ to Mary and Mary Magdalene as they arrive at the tomb with fragrant oil with which to anoint the dead Jesus. These women are the first people to hear of the resurrection, even before the disciples. From a thirteenth- century Nestorian Peshitta Gospel, written in Estrangela. (State Library of Berlin, Prussian cultural collection. Sachau 304, parchment manuscript 195 Bl., Folio 106v.)

(Right) The twelve apostles are gathered around Peter, depicted as an old man, at Pentecost; twelve rays of light from heaven stream down upon their heads. From a thirteenth- century Nestorian Peshitta Gospel, written in Estrangela. (State Library of Berlin, Prussian cultural collection. Sachau 304, parchment manuscript 195 Bl., Folio 123 v.)