Peace Be Upon You (7 page)

By the early decades of the eighth century, the initial conquests were mostly complete. The Umayyads staged several more assaults on Constantinople, and one, led by the caliph’s brother in 717, nearly succeeded. The Umayyads attacked from both land and sea and laid siege to the metropolis. A combination of famine, Bulgarian mercenaries, and Greek fire annihilated the Arab fleet and debilitated the army. It was the last time that the Umayyads came close to toppling Constantinople, and
soon, the Byzantine emperor had reclaimed most of Asia Minor and pushed the Umayyads over the mountains and back into the river valleys and deserts of Syria and Iraq.

Within the Muslim world, Christians began converting to Islam, but in trickles rather than droves. As they moved out of the garrison cities, Arabs were slowly integrated into the societies that the first caliphs had tried to keep them separate from. They married, and their wives and children became Muslim. Arab soldiers found ways to settle and acquire land; Arab merchants began to trade; and men of religion started to carve out a special sphere of influence. Christians who hoped to advance found work with local governors or mayors or even at the court in Damascus, as scribes, translators, and advisers. And slowly, born of contact in both the cities and the surrounding countryside, a new, hybrid culture evolved that combined elements of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, and of Persian, Byzantine, Egyptian, Greek, and Arab society. In North Africa and Spain, Berber and Visigoth were added to the mix. Had the phrase existed, it would have been called a multicultural world.

The tolerance of Muslims toward the People of the Book unfolded in the context of unquestioned Muslim dominance. The conquerors could afford to be tolerant because the People of the Book posed little threat. During Muhammad’s lifetime, that was not the case. The Jews of Medina could have jeopardized Muhammad’s status as both Prophet and leader of the community, and the result was harsh treatment. But once the conquests began, and it became clear that the Christians of the Near East would not and could not resist Muslim domination, the Muslims adopted a policy of tolerance that was both sublime and mundane, sublime because it was grounded in the Quran and mundane because it allowed them to rule an empire with minimal manpower.

Muhammad’s life and the subsequent conquests established a framework for the next millennium and a half. The seeds of both conflict and peaceful coexistence were sown, and however fascinating subsequent history has been, most of what followed has differed only in specifics. The same notes have been endlessly replayed, with variations on the theme, but no radical departures from the score.

For centuries after the initial conquests, coexistence was the norm, but not one whose echo can be heard today. The fall of Jerusalem, the expulsion and execution of the Jews of Medina, and the wars between
the Umayyads and the Byzantines—those are remembered. What came after, in Damascus, in Iraq, Iran, and Andalusia, has become a mirage— glimpses of it appear in the modern world, flickering on the periphery of our collective vision, and then evaporate and disappear. Unlike a mirage, however, that past is real, and nowhere was it more real than on the banks of the Tigris at the court of the caliph in Baghdad.

D
URING THE REIGN
of the caliph al-Mahdi, around a.d. 780, the Nestorian patriarch, Timothy I, was summoned to the palace in Baghdad to debate theology with the caliph himself. Al-Mahdi was a devout man, who spent most of his brief decade as Commander of the Faithful consolidating the realm recently taken over by his family, the Abbasids. Baghdad was a new city in an ancient land, but already it was bustling with the wealth, commerce, and knowledge that came with its status as the epicenter of an empire.

The Nestorian Christians of Iraq had long since broken with the bishops of Constantinople over those fraught questions of Christ’s true nature and whether Mary should be thought of as the mother of God or instead as the mother of Christ. The Nestorians, like the Copts in Egypt, had been deeply disenchanted with Constantinople and had almost welcomed the Muslim conquest. But slowly, they came to see Islam as a threat to Christianity in the Near East, especially because it was the creed of the ruling class. With each passing year, more Christians defected to Islam. As Islam matured, its scholars developed more coherent arguments against Christianity. In an attempt to stem the tide, the Nestorians had to formulate an equally compelling defense.

Timothy was a learned man, befitting his station and status. He was schooled in Greek and in Arabic, and at the time of his audience with the caliph, he had overseen the translation of numerous works of Greek philosophy into Arabic, including scientific tracts by Ptolemy and political treatises by Aristotle. These had been commissioned by the caliph to enhance the wisdom of the Muslim community, and they had been preserved
by the Nestorians because the tools of argument and philosophy were useful to them as well. Those deadly debates about the nature of Christ had been fought not just with swords but with the weapons of rhetoric and logic honed by the ancient Greeks.

It was Timothy’s status as a translator of Aristotle’s
Topics
that drew the attention of the caliph. Al-Mahdi was a man ripe for a challenge, especially a theological one. He had been ruthless in his pursuit of Persian Manichaeans and instituted a pogrom against them. Unlike Christians and Jews, and distinct from Zoroastrians, Manichaeans preached what Muslims took as a godless world defined by a war between Good and Evil. They also were accused of trying to prevent people from converting to Islam, and thereby undermining the legitimacy of the caliph. That made them anathema to the Abbasids, and evicted them from the protective shield that covered the People of the Book.

The brutal suppression of the Manichaeans casts Muslim tolerance for the People of the Book into even sharper relief. The Abbasids were capable of suppressing religious expression if they perceived a clear and present danger. Coexistence with Jews and Christians was therefore a deliberate choice. Unlike the Manichaeans, the Nestorian Christians did not explicitly challenge the legitimacy of Abbasid rule; they simply rejected the message of the Quran, as they had from the beginning of Islam. That was a challenge that al-Mahdi and his court enjoyed.

It was not the first time that the court was the scene of an elaborate debate pitting one faith against another, but it was the first time that the caliph had been one of the debaters. Al-Mahdi’s motivations are lost to us. Perhaps he invited Timothy for a friendly joust simply for sport. After all, the court was the scene of revolving nightly entertainment, with ribald poetry one evening, love songs the next, and scholarly disquisition the evening after. Perhaps the reasons were more serious and sober. Al-Mahdi had a reputation for devotion, and he showered holy sites from Mecca to Jerusalem with his largesse. He was also a reader, and by the time Timothy was summoned, the caliph had studied the works of Aristotle and other philosophers. Just as al-Mahdi would not have gone into battle without a sword and the training to use it, he was not about to invite a Christian scholar to a debate without learning the arts of rhetorical war.

After more than a century of living in a predominantly Christian world, Muslims had analyzed Christian doctrine and found what they
considered to be several glaring issues. Once Timothy had been ushered into the audience chamber, al-Mahdi confronted him with questions about the virgin birth and the nature of Christ, which were two of the hardest questions a Christian theologian could face. If Timothy had been wise, and we have every reason to suppose that he was, he would have anticipated these, but it must have been intimidating nonetheless to stand in front of the Commander of the Faithful and be told the following: “O Catholicus, it does not benefit someone like you, a man of learning and experience, to say about God Almighty that He took himself a wife and bore her a son.” Timothy responded, reasonably enough, that God did not have a wife, and that anyone who said so was a blasphemer. The caliph, wearing the black garments of the Abbasids, sitting on an elevated, richly cushioned platform surrounded by retainers, then asked the patriarch to describe Christ and to explain how it was that God could have had a son. The debate continued in this vein for several hours, the tone courteous and the dialogue elevated.

Both men acknowledged the kinship of Islam and Christianity, though their perspectives could not have been more different. The caliph argued that the Muhammad’s arrival was actually prefigured in the gospel of Saint John. John referred to the “Paraclete,” to the guide or counselor who would come after the death of Jesus to lead his followers, and Muslims argued that the Paraclete was, in fact, Muhammad. The failure of the Christians to flock to the Quran was, said the caliph to Timothy, a failure to heed the prophecy of their own scripture. Timothy, naturally, disagreed. “If I found in the Gospel a prophecy concerning the coming of Muhammad, I would have left the Gospel for the Quran, as I have left the Torah and the [Hebrew] Prophets for the Gospel.”

The caliph then asked Timothy whether he believed that the Quran was the word of God. This was, to say the least, a dangerous question. Timothy could not explicitly say no, because that would have crossed a perilous and possibly fatal line. Even in the court of the caliph, with the understanding that there would be freewheeling and open debate, a Christian could not attack one of the central tenets of Islam. Timothy adeptly sidestepped a direct answer but left no ambiguity about what he thought. “It is not my business to decide whether it is from God or not… but all the words of God found in the Torah and the Prophets, and those of them found in the Gospel and the writings of the Apostles have been confirmed by signs and miracles; as to the words of your book [the
Quran] they have not been corroborated by signs and miracles. Since signs and miracles are proof of the will of God, the conclusions drawn from their absence in your Book is well known to your majesty”
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THE GOLDEN AGE OF BAGHDAD

TIMOTHY’S MEETING
with the caliph was one of many similar encounters between Muslim scholars and Christians in Baghdad and elsewhere. It is easy to overlook how astonishing these exchanges were, and how unusual. The previous centuries had been marked by acrimonious controversies between different Christian sects, which rarely ended with a cordial meal and usually resulted in the imprisonment, death, or excommunication of one or more of the parties. The internecine fighting among Christians, and between Christians and the pagans of Rome, stood in stark contrast to the relative comity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews under the first Muslim empires.

The exchange between al-Mahdi and Timothy took place at the height of the Abbasid power. Only thirty years before, the family of al-Mahdi had led a revolt against the Umayyads. The victory of the Abbasids shifted the locus away from Syria and Damascus and toward Iraq and Iran. The Abbasid revolution had been organized in distant Khurasan, in northeast Iran. It was a disparate coalition of non-Arab Muslims, followers of the party of Ali (Shi’ites), and provincial governors. The revolution had been planned for years, and was launched as a coordinate assault on the Umayyad state. Part of the appeal was the suggestion that the end of days was near, and that the Umayyads had betrayed the message of the Quran. Like the followers of Ali, the Abbasids also claimed that the Umayyads were not the rightful heirs to Muhammad and had unjustly seized the mantle of the prophet.

Buoyed by the eschatological fervor of their followers, the victorious Abbasids (who traced their lineage to al-Abbas, an uncle of Muhammad) soon distanced themselves from many of the allies that had helped them overthrow the Umayyads. Radical ideologies have a way of spinning out of control, and the Abbasids had no intention of relinquishing what they had fought so hard to obtain. If that meant executing erstwhile friends who were more motivated by the hereafter than the now, that was a price the first Abbasid rulers were willing to pay.

In later years, the early Abbasid Empire would be romanticized as the golden age of Islam, and for good reason. At their apex in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, the Abbasids controlled a vast realm. They faced few external threats, possessed immense wealth, exercised astute judgment in administering the empire, and exuded confidence. Their erudition, intellectual sophistication, and artistic creativity easily surpassed the Umayyads. Histories were written, poems composed, works translated, and cities built with graceful architecture and planning. Islamic jurisprudence caught up with the more established corpus of Jewish law, and Islamic mysticism borrowed from Christian monasti-cism and then flowered on its own. Successive caliphs relentlessly pressured the Byzantines and conspired with the Slavs and other enemies of Constantinople to undermine the power of the emperor. The island of Sicily fell to Muslim control at the beginning of the ninth century, and the Mediterranean became a Muslim lake. To the far east, only the mountains of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush stood between the Abbasids and China.