On 28 February 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius issued his famous edict on reli gious observances in the empire (CTh 16.1.2, Code Théodosien. Livre XVI, ed. Theodor Mommsen, trans. Jean Rougé, SC 497, 114; Eng. trans. Clyde Pharr, Theodosian Code, 326). This edict sums up the dilemma faced by Byzantine Christians when confronted by the rise of Islam some 250 years later. In the view of Christians such as John of Damascus, those Arabic-speaking tribesmen who followed the prophet Muham mad seemed to embrace a deviant form of Christianity, one which did not “be lieve in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Their meet ing places were not called churches, and Christians fully expected them to be smitten by divine vengeance, and to be the victims of imperial retribution. As a model, the Byzantines could recall the defeat of the Persians in the first deca des of the seventh century, when– on the pretext of recovering the True Cross, which had been taken from Jerusalem by Shah Chosroes II in 614 CE– the Per sians were defeated in a series of campaigns from 624 to 628 (Barbara Baert, “Exaltatio crucis. De Byzantijnse keiser Heraclius (610–641) en het mid deleeuwse Westen,” Bijdragen. Tijdschrift voor filosofie en theologie 60 (1999): 147–72). However, in the clash with Arab forces in Syria and Palestine, the opposite occurred, and Byzan tine armies led by Emperor Heraclius (610–641) were defeated, most notably at the Battle of Yarmuk (636), which brought to an end 300 years of Byzantine rule in Syria. In the wake of their defeats, Christians were forced to reassess their in itial opinion of this “heresy,” and its relationship with divine providence. Could the people of the prophet Muhammad themselves be instruments of divine vengeance?
In the fourth century, Lactantius had portrayed the Persians in just this way, in his tract De mortibus persecutorum, which described the murder of pagan Roman emperors (namely,Valerian) by King Sapor as an act of divine punishment for their sacrilege (Lactantius, Mort. 5 ed. trans. John L. Creed, 107; Tim Briscoe, “Rome and Persia: Rhetoric and Religion,” Australasian Society for Classical Studies conference, 5–7 February, 2012). Tim Briscoe argues that as Rome became Christianised from the fourth century, historical sources– which were discourses of legitimacy– became more “Christian” and religion became a key factor in the justification of wars. By the time of the Byzantine conflict with Chosroes II, the religious rhetoric was quite specific: Heraclius’ defeat of the Persians was de picted as a victory over God’s enemies, and the salvation of the Christians of Persia (John W. Watt, “The Portrayal of Heraclius in Syriac Historical Sources,” in The Reign of Heraclius (610–641): Crisis and Confrontation, eds. Gerrit J. Reinink; Bernard H. Stolte, 63–79). John of Damascus and to a lesser extent Theophanes, the conflict of Byzantium with Islam was one of orthodox Christianity threatened by heretics, who in the absence of any better analogy, were deliberately likened to Arians (Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition).
John of Damascus’ defence of Christianity
John of Damascus was born some time after 650 CE and died in 749 (Karl-Heinz Uthemann, “Johannes von Damaskus,” in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 3, 331–36). From a wealthy Syrian family, John probably served in the Ummayad administration of Damascus, where he was born. At some stage, early in the eighth century, John moved to Palestine where he joined the monastery of Mar Sabas, near Jerusalem. It is not certain where he composed his theological works, but Andrew Louth argues for their composition in Palestine (Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, OECS, 8–10; Basil Studer, Die theologische Arbeitsweise des Johannes von Damaskus, Studia Patristica et Byzantina 2). Sidney Griffith demonstrates from his survey of the textual evidence of the ninth and tenth centuries that, while there was a steady stream of refugees (and therefore information) from Palestine and Syria to Constantinople from the mid-eighth century onwards, there was little or no traffic from Byzantium to the world of Islam (Sidney Griffith, “Byzantium and the Christians in the World of Islam: Constantinople and the Church in the Holy Land in the Ninth Century,” Medieval Encounters 3/3 (1997): 231–65). John’s polemic against Islam is contained in De haeresibus (De haeresibus PG 94.677–780; Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, IV, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, PTS 22, 19–67), an appendix to his tract De fide orthodoxa (De fide orthodoxa Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, II, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, PTS 12, 7–239). The work dates to around the turn of the seventh to eighth centuries, as Theophanes testifies (Theophanes, Chronographia, AM 6234, a. 741/2 ed. Carolus de Boor, Theophanis Chronographia, vol. 1, 417; Andrew Louth, St John Damascene, 80; Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam. The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites”, 54).
- We have not treated here the Discep tatio Christiani et Saraceni whose authorship is contested, but certainly could have been written by John, as Daniel Sahas contests, though perhaps not in its present form (Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam, 60 and 99; ed. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos IV, 427–38).
Precursor of the Antichrist
John introduces Islam, his one hundredth heresy, as “the superstition of the Ish maelites, which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a precursor of the Antichrist” (Haer. 100). In describing Islam in this way, he was repeating a charge he had leveled in De fide orthodoxa at the fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius (De fide orthdoxa 56). In the same work he defined the Antichrist as “any man who does not confess that the Son of God came in flesh, is perfect God and became perfect man while at the same time being God” (De fide orthodoxa 99; Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam, 63). He used the “precursor of the Anti christ” to dismiss the anti-Chalcedonians or miaphysites in Syria, and the icon oclast emperors Leo III and Constantine V. John attributes the origins of Muhammad’s heresy to the malign influence of an Arian monk,who inspired him to devise his own heresy. John refers to a ha dith that identifies the Syrian monk as Bahîrâ, who predicted Muhammad’s pro phetic powers. After a brief explanation of the origins of the Ishmaelites or Sar acens, John critiques the Qur’an’s account of the origins of Christ and his appa rent but not real crucifixion. Muhammad’s statement that Christ never claimed to be the Son of God is one of the many “extraordinary and quite ridiculous things in this book which he boasts was sent down to him by God,” a claim for which John insists there is no evidence or any witnesses. Nor are there any witnesses that Muhammad was a prophet from God.
- Associators and idolaters
- According to John, Muslim accusations against Christians consist of two charges: that Christians are associators and idolaters.The first accusation John puts down to their misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. Muslims call Christians “associators” (hetaeriasts) because they make Christ an associate or partner of God, byclaiming him to be both the Son of God and God (Haer. 100). John retorts by calling them “mutilators of God:” by avoiding the association of Christ with God– for they confess that Christ is the Word and Spirit of God– they deprive God of Word and Spirit. Second, John explains that Christians are called “idolaters” because they venerate the Cross. In response, John accuses Muslims of litholatry, harking back to Saracen practices of pre-Islamic times, as described by Jerome, Bede, and Isidore of Seville, among other Christian writers (John Tolan, Saracens, 72–78; Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13, 216–19 and 423–27). He poses this question in his mock interrogation of an unnamed Saracen: “How is it then that you rub yourselves against a stone in your Khabar and kiss and embrace it?” This was an ingenuous rhetorical move on John’s part, since he had earlier con ceded that the idolatrous worship of the black stone which represented Aphro dite had ceased with Muhammad’s arrival in Mecca. John continues with the oral tradition: “Then some of them say that Abraham had relations with Agar upon it [the rock] but others say that he tied the camel to it, when he was going to sacrifice Isaac.” John is offended by the gratuitous reference to a camel at the sacrifice of Isaac– he notes that Abraham left his donkeys (not camels) behind with the servants before the sacrifice.
The Camel of God
The Damascene’s lampoon of the Qur’an targets four books (suras) of the Qur’an, which John must have read in Arabic if he read them at all, as the Is lamic scriptures were not yet available in a Greek translation in his day (Erich Trapp, “Gab es eine byzantinische Koranübersetzung?,” Diptycha 2 (1980/1981): 7–17). There seems to have been a translation available by the ninth century (Griffith, “Byzantium,” 259). It is not clear whether John knew Arabic, which only replaced Greek as the language of Arabic administration from the second year of the caliphate of al-Walīd(705 715) onwards (Theoph., Chron. AM 6199 [706/7 CE] ed. de Boor, vol. 1, 376; Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam; Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, trans., The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor. Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813, lxiv–lxvii). The fourth book, The Camel of God it is not a sura of the Qur’an as it has been handed down to us, although several Qur’anic passages refer to it (91.13; 26.155–57; 54.27, 28; 17.61/69; 11.64–66/67, 68; 7.73/71). There is a she-camel mentioned in the Qur’an (96.13), an animal that was given as a sign to test the people of Thamud (Petra) (John E. Merrill, “Of the Tractate of John of Damascus on Islam,” The Muslim World 41 (1951): 88–97 at 94; Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Qur’an, 6th edn).
John’s version of The Camel of God raises the question of whether he had any firsthand knowledge of Islam, or whether his knowledge came simply from books. John Merrill argues against any firsthand knowledge, pointing to two errors in John’s account. First, there are not three rivers in Paradise, but four, con sisting of water, wine, milk, and honey (47.15/16, 17). Second, John of Damascus’ jest that men should become drunk from drinking unmixed wine in Paradise “is impossible, for the wine of Paradise does not intoxicate” (Merrill, “Of the Tractate,” 94). John subjected his version of The Camel of God to a mock Trinitarian anal ysis, as though he was trying to reveal a hidden Arian message. John introduces into the narrative a baby camel of semi-divine status, “which when the mother had been done away with, called upon God and God took it to himself.”
John’s suspicion of an Arian basis for Islamic christology is apparent from his description of the mother camel as “the forerunner,” a term usually reserved for John the Baptist. All this buffoonery is aimed at contesting the prophetic authority of Muhammad, who cannot explain the allegory of the camel and its offspring adequately. Muham mad advocated male and female circumcision, renouncing the Sabbath, refusal of baptism, and abstinence from wine and some foods, “while he ordered them to eat some of the things forbidden by the Law.” One of the forbidden foods which Muhammad ordered them to eat, or at least allowed them to eat, was camel meat, though there is some debate still in Muslim circles about whether this abrogates food pollution laws, with modern commentaries on the text (ha diths) pointing both ways.
Theophanes the Confessor’s Chronographia
Around a century later, Theophanes the Confessor (d. 818), resident in Constan tinople, sought to compose a Greek chronicle in annalistic style to cover the cen\turies from the reign of Diocletian up to his own time. Unfortunately Theophanes had no access to Byzantine histories in Greek for Constans II’s rule (641–668) (Mango and Scott, Chronicle, lxxxix), a key period in the development of Muhammad’s following. Instead, he was ob liged to Syriac sources, especially the so-called “eastern source” that has commonly been identified with Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle (Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, TTH 57, 4–6). Historical sources for the early Arab period from 630 to the 750s were scarce in general (Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, TTH 57, 7–19, 23–24). Other sources for the later period used by Theophanes included Greek date-lists of rulers and patriarchs; a contemporary Greek bios of the iconoclast Emperor Leo III (714–741); and an anti-monothelite tract that drew from Anastasius of Sinai (Mango and Scott, Chronicle, lxxxvii).
By contrast with John Damascene, Theophanes’ representation of the followers of Muhammad is startlingly neutral. This is at least in part due to the generic constraints of the chronicle, and his attempts as a Christian historiographer to explain how their military successes fitted into God’s providential plan for the Byzantine empire (Roger Scott, “The Treatment of Religion in Byzantine Chronicles and Some Questions of Religious Affiliation,” in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity, eds. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 15; Philippe Blaudeau, “Ordre religieux et ordre public: observations sur l’histoire de l’Église post-chalcédonienne d’après le témoignage de Jean Malalas,” in Recherches sur la chronique de Jean Malalas, II, eds. Sandrine Agusta-Boularot et al., 243–56). Thus one popular Christian explan ation of Muslim success was that God was punishing Byzantine Christians for their flirtation with monotheletism, the doctrine of one will in Christ (rather than two, a human and a divine will). Islamic military victories over Emperors Heraclius and his grandson Constans II from the 640s to late 660s were directly linked to imperial sponsorship of the heresy,which was not officially condemned until the Ecumenical Council of 680/81.
- Theophanes’ approach to Islam
- Theophanes embraces this spiritualised explanation of history in his Chronogra phia. He first mentions Muhammad in his entry for 626/7 CE, the year of Siroes’ accession as Persian emperor: “At which time also Moamed, leader of the Arabs, that is, the Saracens, living under the Persians,was in his sixth year out of a total of nine” (Theoph., Chron. AM 6119). Theophanes records the uprising of the Muslims, whom he called Amalekites, in 628/9 CE (Chron. AM 6121). The “persecutor of the church” was the monothelite emperor Constans II, who was murdered in his bath in Sicily in 668, while fleeing the Muslim raids on the East. Theophanes reports that in 741/2, Peter of Maiuma, chartulary of the public taxes, was sentenced to death for his public condemnation of Islam and Muhammad. According to Theophanes, Peter had summoned prominent Arab friends and anathematised their “false prophet and precursor of the Anti christ,” because he “does not believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the consubstantial and life-giving Trinity within a unity” (Theoph., Chron. AM 6234 ed. de Boor, vol. 1, 416–17; trans. Mango; Scott, 577; Mango; Scott, Chronicle, 579 n. 5).
Umar and Sophronius
In c. 638, Umar stood at the gates of the holy city of Jerusalem and demanded that the patriarch, Sophronius, hand over the keys to the city. In Theophanes’ account of this confrontation we find the first Byzantine acknowledgement that Islam was a rival religion, and not a heretical offspring of Judaism or Christianity (Theoph., Chron. AM 6127 [634/5 CE] ed. de Boor, vol. 1, 339; trans. Mango; Scott, 471). The “abomination of desolation” or Antichrist motif was to have a long life in anti-Muslim polemic in the West, where the Islamic conquest was seen as a pre cursor of the Antichrist and the end of the age (John Tolan, Saracens, 45–50; Brett Whalen, Dominion of God. Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 145–46). Here, again, it is the camel-hair cloak that particularly offends the Christian patriarch. Sophronius begs him to take from him a “kerchief and a garment” to wear, but he refused. Eventually he consented to borrow some clothes until his had been washed. Sophronius, after striking this great blow for Byzantine sartorial standards, died and left his city open to the raiders. His struggle against the monothelite heresy of Her aclius and his companions Sergius and Pyrrhus, patriarchs of Constantinople, is duly noted by Theophanes (Theoph., Chron. AM 6127).
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