THE HAGARISATION OF THE FERTILE CRESCENT

The interaction of Hagarism with the provinces of the Fertile Crescent is at once the most crucial and the most complex process in the formation of the new civilisation. It is also a process in the analysis of which the fates of the provinces inside this civilisation on the one hand, and their con-tributions to it on the other, are in the last resort inseparable. Yet it is sim-plest to start one-sidedly with the aude historical fact that the Fertile Crescent was sooner or later overwhelmingly Islamicised and Arabised.

It is useful to begin here with the variant trajectories of the different com-munities of Iraq.

The weakness of the Christian position in Iraq was a dual one: the aristocratic structure of their church rendered the Christians socially vulnerable to conquest by a jealous God, and the gentile nature of their truth made it relatively easy for them to forsake it for another. But although these points applied equally to the provincial church of Assyria and the metropolitan church in Babylonia, there was neverthe-less· a difference between the two in respect of the mechanics of decline.

The Assyrian church was based almost exclusively on a landed aristo-aacy, and both aristocracy and peasants were almost exclusively

Ara-means.

^{The Assyrians} had accordingly taken advantage of Yahweh's

Christian

gentility to sanctify the after-image of their own Assyrian polity, and though the Aramean ethnicity was in itself both weak and

·diffuse, as Assyrians the Christians of northern Mesopotamia enjoyed an

· ethnic,

social and historical solidarity which was both worldly and

• transcendental: unlike the metropolitan Christians they were not only ' c:hildren of the promise and brothers in Christ. Here, therefore, nobles 'and peasants stuck it together. If the Muslims had been prepared to tole-. rate a local aristo<;racy with a local faith, the Christians might have sur-(yived as an Adiabene under Arab hegemony; conversely, if the Muslims

~~d volonteered to sanctify the aristocracy as their own, the Christians (might perhaps have converted together in a Muslim after-image of

Adia-;bene.

But in practice the Muslims envinced no such tolerance and the

:inoblcs

had no such interest in converting. The result was that nobles and

'' ~ 8 3

The collision

peasants alike remained Christians, ¹ the nobles gradually declining into peasants, ² and the peasants declining into defenceless victims of the bedouin marauders who assailed them from the desert and the Turkish and Mongol armies which marched across their land between the centres of civilisation. With the loss of their nobles they no longer had any represen-tatives to keep them going, and they had never possessed an ethnic faith to keep them from converting: even a Ninive was no substitute for a Zion, just as even obscurantist priests ³ were no surrogate for rabbis; and although they refused to vanish altogether from the earth, it was a sorry remnant of Assyria the Europeans were to excavate along with the ruins of their past.

By contrast the Christians in Babylonia had a predominandy Persian aristocracy in a predominandy Aramean countryside on the one hand, and an urban elite of similarly diverse origins on the other. Here, then, Yahweh's Christian· gentility had been used to desanctify the Persian polity so that Christians might accept it, and here equally the ethnic, social and historical continuity of the church was purely transcendental. This did of course make the metrOpolitan church very flexible: what the Nestorians had rendered to a secular King of Kings they would not have withheld from a secular caliph, ⁴ and had the Muslim state not been intrinsically sacred the Christians might perhaps have survived. But it also made the metropolitan church very loose: in northern Mesopotamia the ecclesiastical machinery reinforced a pre-existing moral continuity between elite and masses, but in Babylonia it had to create it- a task in which the aristocratic orientation of the church made success distincdy unlikely. Consequendy, when the nobles all but unanimously decided to stick it as Christians, ⁵ their peasants left them to make it as Muslims; and the peasants having steadily left for Ba$l"a from the mid- Umayyad period onwards, ⁶ the 'Chaldean delta' had become solidly Muslim territory by the middle of the ninth century. ⁷

The remaining Christian elite of the cities succumbed to Hagarene monotheism primarily via the Hellenising pluralism which the 'Abbisid caliphs engendered, the phenomenon which in effect spelt doom to all the non-Muslim urban elites except the

Jews.

When the 'Abbisid enlighten-ment lured the non-Muslims from their ghettoes to take part in an inter-confessional discussion of. truth conducted in the international language of philosophy at the court of Baghdad, the effect was unsurprisingly a renewed attack of the vertigo of relativity: on the one hand the rival truths were no longer insulated by physical segregation, and on the other they could no longer be kept apart by intellectual segregation. The common language deprived the traditional explanations of religious diversity of their old unthinking plausibility, with the new and unsetding consequence

84

The Hagarisation of the Fertile Crescent

·that both the explanations and the truths were put in perspective and so ceased to be supreme. There were some ~ho went Stoic, salvaging the relig-ions as so many municipal signposts to the more elevated insights of con-. ceptual philosophy: thus al-Farabi, ⁸ the Brethren of Purity and other Ismi 'iii

circles, ⁹ or the tenth-century Syriac Book_ of the Cause of Causes; ¹⁰ equally there were some who went Epicurean, rejecting the religions as so many superstitions and intransigently adopting against them the supreine truths of philosophy: thus many ZindifJS, ¹¹ Dabiis, ¹² a}. Rizi..U Ibn al· Rawandi, ¹⁴ the Jew Hiwi of Balkh,¹⁵ or the Chaldean Ibn Wahshiyya.¹⁶ But at all events religious pluralism wrought havoc with the gods, bringing cognitive Babel back where it belonged. ¹⁷

It was evidently the non-Muslims who were going to be the losers in this search for a truth above the truths. The non-Muslims were on the de-fensive as the Muslims were not, and relativising their truths meant relativising their defences.¹⁸ The Christians had an advantage over the Jews in that Christianity had long ago come to terms with conceptual philosophy, and those Christians who were brought to convert directly via philosphy were correspondingly few; ¹⁹ and they had an advantage over the pagan Qaldeans in that philosophy was not a vehicle of their identity, whence the greater ease with which they could share it with the Muslims.

But in return they were weaker than either the Jews or the pagans in the ease with which they could shift their religious truth when the enlighten-ment had created a culture with secular appeal: as a Muslim in Baghdad 'Ali b. 'isa could study Greek philosophy and medicine, cultivate grammar, poetry and secretarial style, research into l:larrinian religion, dispute with the Jews, and retrieve what Christianity he had left in Muslim SUfism. ²⁰ The Christians having neither Zion nor Chaldea to keep them in a 'life apart', they disappeared as Muslim secretaries. ²¹

The Jews and the pagans, on the other hand, were in the same boat to the extent that both had fused their truths with their identities, ²² and that both were represented by a learned laity. This meant that, unlike the Christians, they were not vulnerable to foreign conquest; and at first sight the two communities were equally well-placed to resist con-version. But there was of course a vital difference: the Jewish truth was a personal God, that of the pagans impersonal concepts. And this meant

two things.

In the first place, the astrological cycles of the Qaldeans could gene-rate neither ethnic unity, social solidarity, nor historical meaning.

Ethnically the cycles were without a chosen people; socially they were intelligible only to the elite; and historically they could only explain, but not justify the present. The Jews could obey their God, mourn

8J

Tb1 collision

their polity, and hope for their redemption; but the Chaldeans could only study inexorable revolutions. It is true of course that the astrologic·

al core of late paganism had undergone endless modifications in recog·

nition of the fact that men are afflicted with sublunar emotions; on the one hand the Chaldeans mourned their polity and hoped that their turn would return, ²³ and on the other they developed a certain concern for the masses. ²⁴ But the fact remained that the stars could not articu·

late these emotions: their very point was to be above them, and so long as the stars remained the star-gazers could not coherently adopt a more te!festrial perspective. The masses, however, were unlikely to achieve such detachment; and if on the one hand the stars raised up a people that denied their influence, ²⁵ and on the other this people made them the offer of solidarity and meaning through the cult of an ethnic God, small wonder that the masses obeyed the stars and converted. ²⁶

In the second place, the conceptual character of Chaldean paganism meant that its adherents could not share their truth without effacing their identity. Universal laws can be a peculiar truth only by copyright, not operation; and where one either became a Jew or expropriated the Jewish God, one could practise astrology with at the most a polite acknowledge·

ment. Muslims could borrow Chaldean truths without running any risk of becoming Chaldeans ; but Chaldeans who sold their truths sold also their identity, and this they could not do in a Muslim environment without running the risk of disappearing into it themselves.

So the pagan elite succumbed to Muslim pluralism as the pagan masses had succumbed to Muslim monotheism: when one could be a Muslim practising astrology, the pagans no longer had a truth with which to resist.

The ninth-century exodus of Thabit b. Qurra and his likes from

aarran

²⁷

accordingly led on to the tenth-century conversion of Hllil al-Sabi' in Baghdad;²⁸ whlle the tenth-century Ibn Wa.Qshiyya could only reassert a Shu'iibi copyright. ²⁹

Only the Jews had an ethnic God: unlike the Christians they could afford to be sceptics and still retain their Judaic ethoicity, and unlike the Chaldeans they could afford to practise astrology and still retain their Judaic God. ³⁰ The Jewish God did not of course go very well with con·

cepts, and there were accordingly Jews who were brought to convert by means of them ;³¹ but most of them merely played around with the new conceptual toys. Sa 'adya Gaon borrowed philosophy, obeyed his God and mourned his polity, where Ibn Wa.Qshiyya succumbed to a God and bor-rowed language from the Jews to mourn his. ³² The Jews of Babylon there·

fore survived to be ingathered in modern times by their secular redemption;

but of the pagans, only the Mandeans survived into modem times to seek redemption in Marxist revolutions. ³³

86

The Hagarisation of

the

Fertile Crescent

Although Iraq thus became a predominantly Muslim country, its fate was still not an unrdenting Hagarisation. In the first place, the surviving Christians remained 'Syrians':³⁴ despite the early adoption of Arabic³⁵ and the ultimate disappearance of Syriac as a literary language, ³⁶ Syriac survived as the liturgical language throughout the province and as a ver-nacular in the rural strongholds of the Assyrians ;³⁷ similarly, despite the total ignorance to which the Nestorians had been reduced, they were in no. doubt as to their own non-Arab identity. The coming of the Europeans thus meant the revival of the Suryane, and not as in Syria their final dis-appearance among the Arabs. Where the Christians of Syria were to turn

down the label of Arabised Greeks, those of Iraq readily accepted iden-tification as Chaldeans and Assyrians ;³⁸ where the Christians of Syria were to lead the way in creating a modern Arab culture, those of northern Iraq adopted modern Syriac; and where the Christians of Syria were to provide the theorists of Arab nationalism, the Assyrians yearned once more for a pOlity in Ninive's fair city and Mosul's fertile plain. ³⁹

1

In the second place, the converts left an after-image: the image of Assyria projected onto an Arab screen in the case of the Christians, that of

~bylon in its Chaldean form in the case of the pagans. The Assyrians had a ipolity where the metropolitan Christians were above polities, and it is th;crefore not surprising that only Assyria came through via the Christians.

Bttt at the same time the Assyrians shared their ethnicity⁴⁰ and the

met-rOpOlitan

Christians were above ethnicities, and it is therefore equally unsurprising that the Christians failed to make their mark ethnically or lin-gdisiically in Islam: on the one hand there was no Syrian Shu'iibism, ⁴¹ and oti:the other there were no 'Syrian' Muslims. ⁴² But if the converts failed to

reiain

their civilisation as Suryane, they could ncverthdess do so as South

.Atibians;

and the Arab Christians of Najrin having settled in Najrin of Kiifa<to provide the pivot, 'an Arab from Dayr Qunni' came to mean a spUrious Yemeni. ⁴³ The Christian converts thus became Arabs, but Arabs

with·

a difference; and it was as part of this rather different Arab heritage

,that

the Assyria of the converts⁴⁴ reappeared. The king of Hatra in north-i:enttMesopotamia was accordingly either an Assyrian, ⁴⁵ an Arab with an [~ tide,⁴⁶ or simply a South Arabian;⁴⁷ and ifhewasquitecorrectly

~embered to have defeated Septimius Scverus⁴⁸ and to have been de-lf~ated in turn by Shapiir,⁴⁹ he was also endowed with the more fanciful '\rtputation of having conducted Sennacherib's expedition against Jerusalem

~ t]le days of Jeremiah. ⁵⁰ Likewise the king of }:lira in southern

Meso-~-was regarded as an Assyrian or South Arabian, ⁵¹ and if the

~ of }:lira was too well-known to acquire Biblical deeds, it could

~(~east 'descend from Al)iqar;⁵² while Al)iqar himself, though known in

[<l:l#stian

Arabic, reappears in his Muslim guise as Luqmin the WISe. ⁵³

~!~

87

The collision

The Chaldean after-image, by contrast, reappeared in its own right.

Having fused their truth with their identity, the Chaldeans were bound to resist Arabisation with all the resources of language, polity and rulture at their disposal. Propaganda for Aramaic thus came primarily from a pagan background, ⁵⁴ just as only the pagans produced Aramaic-speaking Muslims. ⁵⁵ The fabulous kings of Babel, their priests of esoteric wisdom, their literati and their sages were mustered with a force which, the etiola-tion of the tradietiola-tion nothwithstanding,⁵⁶ secured for Babylon an after-image in Islam second only to that of Iran. ⁵⁷ But the Chaldean zeal was self-defeating: where other Shu'iibis banded together in a chorus of pro-tests against the Arab identification of Islam, Ibn Wahshiyya directed his hatred indiscriminately against all who threatened his Chaldean primacy, be they Arabs, Persians, ⁵⁸ Greeks, ⁵⁹ Assyrians⁶⁰ or even Syrians. ⁶¹ The Chaldeans having artirulated their identity in terms of universal concepts, civilisation had to be Chaldean outright or to leave the Chaldeans alone. ⁶² But since the Chaldean concepts came in a cleaner version from Greece and Iran, they lost the copyright; and since they lived in lower Iraq, they could not be left alone; and so for all the initial vividness of their after-image, the Chaldeans lost their ethnicity in that of the Arabs as they had lost their truths in Islam.

The trajectories of the various communities of Iraq were thus far from identical: the differing relationships between their identities and their truths on the one hand, and the differing social embodiments of the various traditions on the other, made for very disparate capacities for resistance to Hagarisation. But these variations nevertheless conceal a certain overall homogeneity: all the Iraqi communities, whether Christian, Jewish or pagan, set out knowing perfectly well who they were, and none had any particular need of an Arab identity. The Jews apart, all were more or less overtaken by Hagarisation; but what overtook them was unambiguously their fate, not their destiny.

In contrast to the Iraqi experience, Hagarism was not the fate of Syria but its redemption. It is true, of course, that the blessing remained for some time in disguise. The Hagarenes were after all no Christians, and the Syrians no doubt had every intention of continuing as before. But although they may have felt at least as well-placed to survive as non-Arabs in the name of Christianity as they had been to survive as non-Greeks in the name of Monophysitism, the Syrians were in fact doomed.

The Syrians had survived in Christian Byzantium because Christianity is only a religion. It was at once the supreme metropolitan truth and the one truth that the metropolitans themselves had not invcoted; and as long as truth and identity were in this way conceptually distinct, the Syrians

88

The Hagansation of the Fertile Crescent

could play one against the other. Conversdy, it was because Christianity is only a rdigion, or in other words a truth which can be combined with any ethnicity and polity, that Christians could contrive to hang on in Muslim Syria:⁶³ the notions of Arab Jews, Arab Zoroastrians or Arab Berbers are at the very least problematic, but Arab Christians are a head·

ache only to the Muslims. So where Abu 'fsa al-I$faharu, Bihifarid and

I:Ia-mim

tried to save their ethnic and political identities by syncretic deals with the new Hagarene truth, it was as difficult for the Christians to revolt in the name of Christianity⁶⁴ as it was by the same token easy for them to accept the Arabs as their deliverers. ⁶⁵ Yet it was also because Christianity is only a religion that the Syrians could not in the last resort survive when the distinction between the metropolitan truth and identity had ceased to exist. They could flog the Greeks with their barbarian doctrine, but against the Hagarenes they needed a worldly identity, preferably one fused with their truth; and this they did not possess. That Jesus was no Greek might embarrass the Hellenes, but he would have had to be a very committed Syrian for his ethnicity to make much impression on the Hagarenes; like-wise it might impress the Hellenes that cultural inventiveness was not purely Greek, but the purely Christian Sbu'ubism of the Syrians contained nothing to dent the cultural pride of the Hagarenes. ⁶⁶ The Arab Ghassa-nids could join in restoring a Syrian church as fellow-barbarians against the Greeks; but they were no Syrian barbarians against the Arabs, and if Jabala b. al-Ayham opted for a Christian exile in Byzantium, ⁶⁷ most of his subjects appropriately made themselves at home as Hagarenes in Syria.

Christians to God and barbarians to the Greeks, the Syrians would have needed a rather more consolidated identity against the Arabs.

Consequently, when the divine punishment was obviously going to last a good deal longer than the usual run of earthquakes, famines, droughts, locusts, plagues and invasions with which the Lord habitually chastiseth whom He loveth, the Syrians began to go soft. By the end of the eighth century the hopefully temporary chastisement for our Christian sins had become a presumably permanent punishment for the heresies of the Greeks ;⁶⁸ and when in the thirteenth the Crusades threatened to bring back the Chalcedonians, it was firmly agreed that the conquests had left us all better off. ⁶⁹ Arabic may have begun to make inroads on Syriac as a spoken language as early as the beginning of the eighth century;⁷⁰ by the tenth century it had become a Christian literary language, ⁷¹ by the eleventh Syriac had ceased to be spoken,¹² and by the fourteenth it had ceased to be written. ⁷³ By this time the Jacobites had all but disappeared among the Arabs, and the Melkites had inherited the designation Suryane;¹⁴ by the sixteenth century the Jacobites had all but disappeared in Islam, ⁷⁵ and the Melkites went on to inherit their Ghassamd ancestors. ⁷⁶ When the

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In document HAGARISM THE (página 93-102)