Robert Hoyland on Arabic Conquests

When we were last met together, we were discussing Michael Philip Penn's two recent and highly valuable books. In those he mentions other scholars who came before him in attempting, however incompletely, to make the Syriac encounters with Islam--by far the earliest such encounters, and the ones with the most numerous and most contemporaneous documentation--better known. One of those pioneering scholars was Robert Hoyland, author of the recent study In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Hoping for a longer review later, I post a few notes here about this important book deserving a place in every library concerned with Islamic history and the history of Muslim-Christian relations.

Hoyland begins by noting an unapologetic preference for 7th- and 8th-century texts, which are of course the earliest such records. What makes this approach innovative, but also, for a time, anathema to other scholars, is that these texts are often thought--disdainfully by some--as being largely "Christian" texts.

But this illustrates the central point he's going to make: there is no clear differentiation, in the earliest generations, between Arab Muslims and Syriac Christians; such a separation would come much later, and not be nearly so clear or so sharp as many today imagine. Other scholars have known for quite some time of the existence of these texts, but have avoided using them, leaving us as a result with virtually nothing--certainly nothing reliable--in the first generations of Islam after the Quran. To overcome this caesura, Hoyland is openly recognizing and using what he terms an "overwhelmingly" large number of texts of Christian provenance in Syriac and other non-Arab languages. For obvious reasons most Islamists before this have avoided using them. He's not just using or championing these texts over Islamic ones: he's arguing that the distinction between them is false and misleading.

Hoyland will also challenge a couple of other commonplaces in this book, including the one that sees the Arab advances in the 630s-640s as staggering and relentless in their success. Not quite so fast, he says, in more ways than one: it is better to see these advances over the longer period of  630-740 and to note during that period that there were some setbacks as the Arabs had to learn and adjust to a world so new to them in many ways.

As they encountered that world, Hoyland documents just how much it was not in fact totally overturned or remade by the Arabs. Neither did they bring in a dramatically new civilization from Western Arabia so much as remake existing ones, drawing on Christian and other elements to cobble together what, thanks to Hoyland, Penn, and contemporary scholars, we now recognize as a real bricolage. 

Michael Philip Penn on the Encounter Between Islam and Syriac Christianity

Twice last year we were blessed with very important books by Michael Philip Penn treating the tremendously significant but insufficiently understood Syriac encounters with early Islam. What follows is not so much a full review as an an aide-mémoire containing some notes on both of them considered singly and together.

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World  (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015), by Michael Philip Penn, opens by noting the many problems that we today have in understanding these encounters. First, we tend to interpret them through a prejudicial lens of "class of civilizations," sometimes seeing antagonisms where there are none. Second, we rely too much on Greek and Latin texts when the first encounters took place in neither language, but instead in Syriac, which language retains the largest single body of (largely untranslated) documents about the Muslim-Christian encounter. It is Penn's burden in this book to bring those documents from, as he says, the periphery to the centre of the encounter, changing our understanding of it thereby.

An additional benefit of these documents comes from their contemporaneous nature, recording stories of early Islamic life and so filling in well-known gaps in Arab history, which lags at least a century behind Qur'anic texts and thus contains little that is reliable of the first generation after Mohammad.

Additionally, Penn notes that early Syriac sources record interactions with Muslims that are more positive than we may imagine, though there is no uniformity here, either positive or negative. Instead we have "fuzzy boundaries and categorical ambiguity" (4). We also have an array of texts in different genres, ranging from short marginal notes to lengthy treatises. One thing that becomes clear from this body of literature is that Islam and Syriac Christianity were too entangled for each to see the other as clearly separate and "other." This entanglement was not a temporary blip or short-lived, either, Penn suggests, but remained for several generations after they first met. The differentiation was gradual and messy, and would remain fluid for much longer than most realize.

Additionally, when Islam encounters Christianity in its Syriac forms, it does not encounter a unified Christianity, for we live, of course, in the aftermath of Chalcedon, and Syria was on the frontlines of the Christological divisions. Further contextual divisions occur in the same period as a result of the many conflicts between Byzantium and the Persians.

Penn notes that one of the first books to begin, however incompletely, to draw on Syriac sources was the controversial 1977 study of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World. Since then other scholars--e.g., Barbara Roggema, Gerrit Reinink, Andrew Palmer, and of course Sidney Griffith--have drawn on some Syriac sources or made them available in translation.

But the virtue of this book stems, in part, from its bringing together much of this literature in one place rather than confining it to specialized articles in scholarly journals.

Its additional virtues come from undermining (once more....) the oft-repeated nonsense about how non-Chalcedonian Eastern Christians "welcomed" Muslim invaders to save them from their perfidious "friends" in the "imperial" (Chalcedonian) Church. Others have shown this to be false, but Penn provides perhaps the most comprehensive take-down of this tenacious lie.

Early Syriac treatments of Islam (the earliest treated here dates to the 630s, the latest to the 860s) tended to regard the latter less as a totally extraneous tradition, and more as a strange variant of the former. This would change over time, leaving us with a picture that fits nobody's contemporary narrative. Instead, what we see is a series of "complex, heavily negotiated interactions occurring in a rapidly changing and highly permeable environment." It is important, Penn notes in the conclusion, that this history be much better understood if only to correct commonplaces today that would see Muslim-Christian relations, especially in Syria, condemned to a narrative of endless antagonism and violence based on a partial picture of the past.

Such a picture is best illustrated by viewing some of the various documents Penn draws on, and so it makes sense that last year at the same time he also published just such a collection of source material: When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam.

This is a collection of 28 texts that vary widely in genre, as well as chronology, context, and "confessional" nature. As such, it offers us a portrait of the Syriac-Muslim encounter that is not neat and does not conform to the two widely available hermeneutics today--that of relentless intolerance, violence, and dhimmitude; or that of hand-holding hippies avant la lettre who lived in endless peace and harmony. The value of such a collection consists not just in upending today's prejudices, but also in making available some of the oldest, most immediate records of the earliest encounters with Islam. In doing so, it helps us escape the hegemony of Western texts, both Byzantine and Latin.

After a brief prologue, this second book's introduction immediately zeroes in on the year 630 as pivotal not just for Muslim-Christian relations, but for the history of the region and so of the world. Penn also focuses briefly on the history of scholarship connected with the region, and with Islam, noting how often it has been shaped by the presuppositions of those scholars coming from the West with their own agendas.

Penn also pays tribute to those earlier scholars who attempted, often piecemeal, to do what he is attempting to do more widely here, including the collection of Andrew Palmer from 1993, The Seventh Century in the West Syrian Chronicles.

Additionally, he mentions Robert Hoyland's Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam. 

Hoyland is the author of another recent book, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, about which more another day.

The Rise of the Arab-Muslim Empire

When I review with my students the creation of Islam and rise of the Arabs in the early seventh century, and the latter's sweeping moves across Christian territories in Syria, Egypt, Armenia, North Africa, and elsewhere, I remind them that by any measure, ancient or modern, the Arab forces were making astonishing changes in even more astonishingly short a time. A new book from a respected scholar gives us a fresh and wider look at that history: Robert G. Hoyland, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

In just over a hundred years--from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750--the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time. How this collection of Arabian tribes was able to engulf so many empires, states, and armies in such a short period has perplexed historians for centuries. Most accounts of the Arab invasions have been based almost solely on the early Muslim sources, which were composed centuries later to illustrate the divinely chosen status of the Arabs.

Robert Hoyland's groundbreaking new history assimilates not only the rich biographical information of the early Muslim sources but also the many non-Arabic sources, contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous with the conquests. In God's Path begins with a broad picture of the Late Antique world prior to the Prophet's arrival, a world dominated by two superpowers: Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. In between these empires, emerged a distinct Arabian identity, which helped forge the inhabitants of western Arabia into a formidable fighting force. The Arabs are the principal actors in this drama yet, as Hoyland shows, the peoples along the edges of Byzantium and Persia--the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars, and Turks--all played critical roles in the remaking of the old world order. The new faith propagated by Muhammad and his successors made it possible for many of the conquered peoples to join the Arabs in creating the first Islamic Empire. Well-paced, comprehensive, and eminently readable, In God's Path presents a sweeping narrative of a transformational period in world history.

From Hellenism to Islam

Robert Hoyland, to whom I have recently drawn attention, is one of four editors of a new collection, published in hardback in 2009 and released in paperback only in January of this year, from Cambridge University Press: From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (CUP, 2012, 512pp.).

About this book, the publisher says:

The eight hundred years between the first Roman conquests and the conquest of Islam saw a rich, constantly shifting blend of languages and writing systems, legal structures, religious practices and beliefs in the Near East. While the different ethnic groups and cultural forms often clashed with each other, adaptation was as much a characteristic of the region as conflict. This volume, emphasizing the inscriptions in many languages from the Near East, brings together mutually informative studies by scholars in diverse fields. Together, they reveal how the different languages, peoples and cultures interacted, competed with, tried to ignore or were influenced by each other, and how their relationships evolved over time. It will be of great value to those interested in Greek and Roman history, Jewish history and Near Eastern studies.

If you click through to Amazon you can access the detailed table of contents.  

Theophilus of Edessa

Thanks to the work of such as Sidney Griffith and others, we are increasingly aware of how influential Christians, especially Christian scholars, were in the opening centuries of the new Islamic empire, and how much of Islamic culture is in fact derivative of an aboriginal Christian culture. Along comes a new translation of an ancient scholar's works that furthers our understanding of all this: Robert G. Hoyland, trans, Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle: And the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool University Press, 2011), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Theophilus of Edessa was a Greek astrologer and scholar in the court of the Muslim caliphs in the eighth century. Making use of his fluency in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, he brought together historical sources from each language to comprise a single chronicle that charted world-changing events in the Near East from 590–750 CE, among them the Arab conquests, the rise to power of a Muslim Arab dynasty, and the last great war of antiquity, between Byzantium and Iran. Though no longer extant, Theophilus’s work is known from extensive citations by later historians, and Robert Hoyland has here collected and translated these citations to present the scope of the original text. Included are translations of four chronicles, several of which are being made available here for the first time to the English-language reader.