From Acolyte toṢaḥābī?: Christian Monks as Symbols of Early Confessional Fluidity in the Conversion Story of Salmān al-Fārisī

2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Bradley Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Early Islamic

AbstractThis paper will examine the narrative of Salmān al-Fārisī/”the Persian” and his conversion to Islam, as recounted in the eighth-centurySīraof Ibn Isḥāq, as a lens into the laudatory interpretation of Christian monasticism by early Muslims. This account of Salmān al-Fārisī (d. 656 CE), an originalCompanion(ṣaḥābī) of the Prophet Muḥammad, vividly describes his rejection of his Zoroastrian heritage, his initial embrace of Christianity, and his departure from his homeland of Isfahan in search of a deeper understanding of the Christian faith. This quest leads the young Persian on a great arc across the Near East into Iraq, Asia Minor, and Syria, during which he studies under various Christian monks and serves as their acolyte. Upon each master’s death, Salmān is directed toward another mystical authority, on a passage that parallels the “monastic sojourns” of late antique Christian literature. At the conclusion of the narrative a monk sends Salmān to seek out a “new Prophet who has arisen among the Arabs.” The monks, therefore, appear to be interpreted as “proto-Muslims,” as links in a chain leading to enlightenment, regardless of their confessional distinction. This narrative could then suggest that pietistic concerns, shared between these communities, superseded specific doctrinal boundaries in the highly fluid and malleable religious culture of the late antique and early Islamic Near East.

scholarly journals Fluid Boundaries: Christian Sacred Space and Islamic Relics in an Early Ḥadīth

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Adam C. Bursi
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Near East ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Ritual Practices

Abstract This article examines a ḥadīth text that illustrates the complicated interactions between Christian and Islamic sacred spaces in the early period of Islamic rule in the Near East. In this narrative, the Prophet Muḥammad gives a group of Arabs instructions for how to convert a church into a mosque, telling them to use his ablution water for cleansing and repurposing the Christian space for Muslim worship. Contextualizing this narrative in terms of early Muslim-Christian relations, as well as late antique Christian religious texts and practices, my analysis compares this story with Christian traditions regarding the collection and usage of contact relics from holy persons and places. I argue that this story offers an example of early Islamic texts’ engagement with, and adaptation of, Christian literary themes and ritual practices in order to validate early Islamic religious claims.

Conclusion to Part II

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-176
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Near East ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Rural Markets ◽  
Early Islamic

From 700, the early Islamic economy remained strongly aligned with its late antique heritage, which brought a definite rupture between the Near East and Europe. Robin Fleming shows that Britain’s towns fell into total decay after the departure of the Roman legions.1 The prominence of the urban marketplace in the Near East in the early Middle Ages certainly contrasted with Carolingian Europe in that the European systems of exchange mostly took place in the form of weekly rural markets....

Reshaping Marketplaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Early Islamic

Early Islamic marketplaces have been studied almost exclusively for their art historical and architectural values, by Maxime Rodinson in the preface of El señor del zoco en España, while their functioning and process of development have not yet been fully elucidated. It is also believed that marketplaces in early Islam functioned as their late antique predecessors, with apparently nothing bequeathed from pre-Islamic Arabia, where dedicated spaces for trade were extremely rare. This chapter considers what happened to urban marketplaces in the Near East after the Muslim conquests, to look at the fate of the late antique legacy under the new Arab masters—a people with contrasting indigenous commercial traditions—in the context of new power dynamics from 700 to 950. It explores the ways in which early medieval marketplaces differed from the late antique past, and the role they played in the agrarian society of early Islam.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND LATE ANTIQUE SOCIAL STRUCTURES

2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-56
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Sodini
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Archaeological Remains ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Rural Environments ◽  
The Social

The archaeological remains of late antique sites can be interpreted in terms of what they can tell us about ancient social structures. This is more straightforward when examining the social structures of the upper classes, who possessed the attributes that allow them to be recognised as such. These attributes occur on a Mediterranean-wide basis and include lavishly decorated residences (in both urban and rural environments), monumental funerary structures within churches, splendid garments, precious table wares and implements, and the insignia of rank in the form of jewellery such as gold brooches, fibulae, or belt buckles. The middle class is also traceable in the cities (mostly in the form of craftsmen) and in the countryside, where small landowners and peasants could share similar lifestyles, marked in some regions (such as the Near East and Asia Minor) by conspicuous levels of wealth. However, the lives of these middle classes could change abruptly, casting them into poverty and consequently making them difficult to trace archaeologically. Nonetheless, judicious interpretation of the material remains in tandem with the evidence of documentary and epigraphic sources allows us to make some suggestions as to the social structures of Late Antiquity.

Khanāṣira and Andarı̄n (Northern Syria) in the Umayyad Period and a New Arabic Tax Document

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Hoyland
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic

This chapter provides the first edition and translation of an early eighth-century documentary text on marble found in the course of excavations at the Late Antique/early Islamic town of Andarīn in modern-day northern Syria. As well as presenting the text itself, which is of a fiscal nature, the author considers various related issues, such as the identity of the sender of the document, the archaeological context of its discovery, the practice of writing on marble, the history of Andarīn and its relationship to nearby settlements (especially Khanāṣir/Anasartha), early Islamic fiscal practice, and the activities of the Umayyad family in northern Syria.

scholarly journals stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa face aux milieux cléricaux islamiques et miaphysites (i er–iie /viie –viiie siècles)

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-226
Author(s):  
Simon Pierre
Keyword(s):  
Close Contact ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Rural Populations ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Civic Spaces ◽  
Syrian Orthodox ◽  
Holy Man ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Important Evidence

Stylites (esṭūnōrē) represented a major form of eremitism in late antique and early Islamic Syria and Mesopotamia. As archetypes of the Holy Man described by Peter Brown, they were in close contact with rural populations (pagani) and therefore promoted the Christianization of such marginal, non-civic spaces. In doing so, they quickly became authorities competing with urban bishoprics. Many Syriac sources (such as synodical canons) attest to preaching, teaching, arbitration, judgments, and even administrative sentences carried out by these ascetics on columns for faithful crowds (ʿamē) in villages. Consequently, the churches, and especially the Syrian Orthodox Church, tried to use them for local anchorage during the seventh and eighth centuries while, at the same time, seeking to integrate them into stable and enclosed monastic structures. These solitary monks also fascinated Arab populations since St. Simeon both invented this asceticism and converted local Bedouins. Indeed, the Muslim tradition contains important evidence of the influence exerted by the so-called ahl alṣawāmiʿ on Muslims. In this article I demonstrate that during the first two centuries of the hijra, the concept of ṣawmaʿ(a) exactly matches the Syriac understanding of esṭūnō as a retreat on top of a high construction, whether a square tower or a proper column. I rely on poetry, early lexicography, bilingual hagiography and historiography, and especially the Syriac and Arabic versions of Abū Bakr’s waṣiyya, which expressly refers to these monks. I then show how the developing Islamic authorities tried to divert Arab Muslims from these initially privileged and valued figures. To this end, they used the same kinds of arguments as did the canonical anathemas against stylites, who were also often seen as competitors and threats by the official ecclesiasticalauthorities. Scholars of ḥadīṯ, fiqh, and tafsīr developed their own rhetoric, distinguishing, for instance, between good stylites and bad “tonsured” ones, while jurists gradually restricted their initial tax privileges. Finally, the latter, at the end of the second/eighth century, they required Muslims to completely avoid them, completing the process of excommunicating both Christianity and its most revered figure.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

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