Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton Studies on the Near East) - Hardcover

Robert M. Haddad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691030863 ISBN 13: 9780691030869

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1971

Synopsis

The author examines the role played by Syrian Christians in accelerating the forces of change in Muslim society at two junctures: the formative phase of Islamic civilization and the Ottoman collapse.

Originally published in 1971.

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About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Syrian Christians in Muslim Society

An Interpretation

By Robert M. Haddad

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-03086-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Syrian Christians in Muslim Society, 3, 
Bibliography, 99, 
Index, 107, 

CHAPTER 1

SYRIAN CHRISTIANS IN MUSLIM SOCIETY

AN INTERPRETATION

* * *

On the politically dominant community whose institutions are more or less formed and stable, the marginal community can have little effect. The latter's power to influence and shape is greatest at those junctures when the characteristic institutions of the dominant community are in the process of formation, radical modification, or destruction by forces which the marginal community may or may not have helped generate but which it is able to accelerate and focus. Twice the Syrian Christians (marginal by virtue of Muslim definition sustained by Muslim political power) have played this role, each time by accelerating the movement of profane learning from the "West" to the Islamic world; on the first occasion conducting, in part through their Christianity and in part through the Greek learning they had assimilated to their faith, many of the intellectual currents which were to lead to the creation of the salient institutions of Islamic civilization; and on the second occasion, a millennium later, accelerating through the thrust of their own aspirations, aroused and instructed by their earlier and more intimate connections with European civilization, a number of those forces which were to modify radically, when they did not destroy, the characteristic institutions of the dominant Arab Muslim community.

Substantively, of course, the cultural role of the numerically preponderant Syrian Christians in the early Islamic centuries and that of the Arabized Syrian Christian minorities in the modern era differed as much as the distinct epochs in which each group labored. There exists nonetheless an organic connection between the early and later process, since each was rooted in an epoch which demanded radical institutional change within Muslim society and so afforded the marginal Christians the opportunity to influence the self-definition of the dominant community. Obviously, however, the concrete results of each process were not analogous. The earlier was instrumental in the construction of a religiously rationalized non-Christian society, and the part played by Syrian Christians in that development could extend little beyond transmission — that is, they posed many of the critical questions and provided much of the material and method with which Islam would frame its own answers to those questions.

This first age of transmission closed when, somewhat before the end of the great formative phase of Islamic civilization, its appointed task was done. There emerged then those definitions by which the dominant community would abide and, abiding, push further toward the margin all those who refused fully to accept them. And under the prolonged disability which is its fate, the marginal community — even if still a numerical majority — necessarily turns inward, closes upon itself ; the creative urge withers and the cultural achievement becomes confined largely to preservation and commentary on that preserved. Thus the ever more emphatic marginality of the Syrian Christians after the formative phase of Islamic civilization served progressively to deplete their resources, intellectual and artistic no less than human and material.

Yet if the Islamic centuries worked to erode the energies and resources of the Christians, Islamic tolerance served virtually to ensure Christian survival. Survival ensured, in turn, that any opportunity — short of conversion — which seemed to promise the Christians an end to marginality would be seized upon by the more aware and ambitious among them. But this opportunity comes in its fullness only when the characteristic institutions of the dominant community evidence failing viability, when survival of the dominant community seems to necessitate new institutional expression, new definitions. So in modern times, as the Western assault demonstrated the inadequacy of traditional Islamic institutions, the Syrian Christians, because of their earlier exposure to the West and their understandably greater receptivity to its various messages, assumed once more the transmitter's role.

This second age of transmission, however, was, in the motivation of its movers and in its effect, markedly different from the first. For on the second occasion, and however unconsciously, the Syrian Christians strove for the dissolution of an Islamic order which, if true to its own canons, could only affirm for Christians that marginal status which had been theirs for over a thousand years. Hence the effort of Syrian Christians in the late nineteenth and twentieth century to create essentially secular nationalisms which would be blind to confessional distinctions or, as in the case of Lebanese nationalism, would even incline toward Christian predominance. In this period the transmitter tended to metamorphose into the innovator, the would-be definer of the new.

The Syrian Christians' modern contact with the West began, of course, in the Ottoman era, an era which saw, as it unfolded, fundamental changes taking place within these Christian communities, changes whereby they acquired the knowledge and awareness and clarified those aspirations which would enable them once more to don the transmitter's mantle, this time in the eastern Arab world of late and post-Ottoman times. The events of the Ottoman era, therefore, will command the burden of this essay's historical analysis, for it was the period wherein a world was undone and another promised, one which gave the Syrian Christians a glimpse of new possibilities. The age of the Osmanli may be seen as the preparatory phase for the second age of transmission.

The primary concerns of this essay then are three: to indicate in broad outline the nature of Syrian Christian participation in the formative phase of Islamic civilization; to describe and analyze in some detail the alterations in the condition and prospects of the Syrian Christians — notably the Maronites and Melkites (Orthodox and, after c. 1650, Uniate as well) — during the disintegrative phase of Ottoman Islamic civilization; and, reverting once more to the broad stroke, to clarify the distinct parts played by the Syrian Christian communities as Ottoman collapse seemed to compel the eastern Arab world to develop non-Islamic norms of political and social organization.

I

A difficult geography, generally less favorable to the administrator than to the outlaw and heretic, together with the ideas of men moving in trade and conquest from the Persian plateau and Anatolia, Egypt and Arabia, Greece and Rome, have been the historic guarantors of Syrian religious diversity.

The unity of Christianity in its birthplace scarcely survived the conversion of Constantine by a hundred years. The Islamic faith carried by the invading Arabs in the seventh century encountered a Syrian Christianity decisively and disastrously fractured by those religio-social movements of the fifth century known as the "christological controversies." Directed as much against Byzantine imperial control as against Byzantine religious orthodoxy, these controversies provided Orthodox Christendom with two of its most enduring heresies — the Nestorian and Monophysite (the Syrian adherents of this latter commonly known then as now as "Jacobites"). Energetic Byzantine efforts at reconciliation in the late sixth and early seventh century, in advancing yet another definition of the nature of Christ, produced only further fragmentation. The resultant Monothelite heresy, however, was largely eliminated during the Crusades when most of its erstwhile adherents, the Maronites, submitted to Rome and were joined soon after by their more recalcitrant fellows. Maronite submission to the papal see represented perhaps the most important legacy, at least on Syrian soil, of the Western Christian intrusion. In any event the Maronites have since remained, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm, committed to Rome.

It is likely that the Muslim conquest found the largely rural-based Jacobites numerically preponderant. The Orthodox Melkites ("Royalists") for their part, while represented in rural Syria, enjoyed greatest strength in the cities where Byzantine government and culture had been most vital. The Nestorians, their areas of greatest concentration being Mesopotamia and Persia, were of no great importance in geographic Syria. The then Monothelite Maronites were a fledgling and still largely monastic community whose evolution into one of the two most important Syrian Christian sects was to await migration to, and centuries of residence in, the mountain refuge of the Lebanon.

Inevitably, Islam exacted a heavy toll. Yet it must be emphasized that the process of apostasy, though relentless, was nevertheless gradual. No attempt was made by any Muslim government to exterminate the Christians, and only rare and isolated attempts were made forcibly to convert them. They were, by Koranic designation, "People of the Book" — men who possessed, albeit in incomplete and perverted form, Divine revelation — and as such were granted wide internal autonomy under their own ecclesiastical leaders and law. In return, they were to submit to the temporal authority of the Muslim state, pay a special poll tax, and endure certain legal and social disabilities. If, on one hand, the considerable autonomy granted tended to preserve the various Christian sects, their marginal status could effect ultimately only their cultural and numerical impoverishment. At few times in the course of the Muslim centuries was it other than perfectly clear to the non-Muslim that most mundane interests would be served by conversion to the faith of the Prophet. Only apostasy offered the full range of possibility. Most non-Muslims were to take that step.

The reduction of the Nestorians and Jacobites was most Complete — and not entirely for the preceding reasons. Their heavily rural concentration in the east not only exposed the Nestorians to the perennial pressures of Arab nomads (which pressures increased always in direct proportion to the weakness of the central government) but placed them squarely in the path of the Turkomen and Mongol invasions of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Nor was their plight alleviated by the Timurid "restoration." The Jacobites, concentrated in the rural east and west, were exposed to many of the same pressures of Arab and Turkomen tribes as well as to maximum damage from the general economic decline and relative intolerance (this latter largely a Crusader legacy) of the Mamluk period, c. 1250-1516. With these factors must be noted the lack of moral and material support from cosectaries beyond the "Abode of Islam." The only other Monophysites in any number were the Copts of Egypt and perhaps the Armenians — the former under the sway of Islam and undergoing the same process of erosion as their Syrian brethren, while the free development of the latter was threatened now by Byzantium and now by Islam. The far-flung missionary activity of the Nestorians, and to some extent the Jacobites, gave rise only to small, beleaguered, and, excepting the Monophysites of south India, ultimately ephemeral communities. Nor would any explanation of the almost total reduction of the Nestorians and Jacobites be complete without pointing out that their role (partly the result of the Islamic thrust of their respective christologies?) in the construction of medieval Muslim civilization was of a magnitude sufficient to lead many of them to complete identification with it.

The Maronites were preserved in some strength only by the relative security of their mountain home, for between the exit of the Crusaders and the seventeenth century any support they received from their Latin coreligionists was inconsequential. The Melkites too survived in some strength, essentially because of their urban concentration and their connections with the living and long-creative civilization of Byzantium. For both communities, however, the Mamluk era was less than happy.

In brief, then, as we approach the sixteenth century and the era of Ottoman Muslim control in Syria, the dominant Christian communities are the Maronites, found almost entirely in the northern sections of Mt. Lebanon, and the Orthodox Melkites, found in small pockets throughout Syria but in strength only in the lower reaches of the mountains above Tripoli and in the urban centers; even in the urban centers, however, they constitute a minority. The Jacobites and Nestorians are numerically insignificant remnants of once proud traditions while a small though economically important Armenian community, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the rest of the Syrian population, can be found mainly in Aleppo. Together, in roughly equal proportions, the Maronites and Melkites make up perhaps one-fourth to one-third of the Syrian population.

II

As the seventeenth century opened, and with It the modern history of the Near East, a role for the Syrian Christians in any political or intellectual movement which might fructify in the life of the Muslim community seemed unlikely. Despite the probability that until the late thirteenth century they had formed the majority element in Syrian society, their energies, particularly after the tenth century, had been expended in a struggle for simple survival against a militant faith which was not less successful for substituting a policy of tolerance and studied humiliation for one of open persecution.

At the risk of imposing a rather too neat order on things, it may be claimed that the intellectually and, to a marked degree, aesthetically creative phase of Syrian Christianity ended soon after the demise of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750. The less than one hundred years of this Arab Muslim monarchy witnessed the rapid development of the political organization but little more than the first stirrings toward concrete institutionalization of the Islamic theocracy implied by the Koran and the Prophet's community at Madinah. The still poorly equipped Muslim jurists and theologians could only begin to ponder the questions being posed by Eastern Christianity and the Hellenistic thought it had in part embodied. The intellectual and social milieu was, if anything, more latitudinarian than it had been under the official Orthodoxy of Byzantium and possibly more latitudinarian than at any time until the period following the First World War. So far indeed was the Muslim community from achieving its intellectually distinct identity that the last of the great Syrian Christian doctors, St. John of Damascus (d. 748) could regard Islam more or less as another Christian heresy. And a certain symbolic richness lies in the fact that the Umayyad dynasty and the Melkite Damascene (who before taking the monk's garb had been, or so legend informs us, friend and drinking companion of the son and heir of the first Umayyad) died within two years of each other. For the destruction of the Umayyads signaled an acceleration of the process of institutionalization of the theoretic Islamic theocracy, and the passing of Syrian Christianity from its creative age to a twilight age of transmission.

This, the first age of transmission, covered the period from roughly 750 to 950 when largely Nestorian and Jacobite translators, working from Greek into Arabic directly or, more commonly, through extant translations in their native Syriac, brought to the eager Muslims virtually the entire range of Syrian Christian and pagan Greek thought, the catalytic agents through which were created the characteristic institutions of medieval Islam. Before the end of the tenth century the law (in Schacht's felicitous phrase, "the essential kernel of Islam") had been shaped in its fullness and theoretic immutability. At the death of al-Ghazzali in IIII, Islamic law, theology, and mysticism had been launched toward something resembling equilibrium, and a self-contained intellectual system more or less definitively formed. Islam, with a brilliance that still impresses, had delineated the area that would contain all journeys. With fewer and fewer exceptions, meaningful political and cultural participation in the life of the Islamic world came to presuppose adherence to the faith of the Prophet in its Sunni formulation.

The end of the first age of transmission, then, saw the intellectual and aesthetic impulse of the Syrian Christians gradually reduced to commentary and compilation (and these only irregularly pursued), even as their numerical preponderance was reduced from a substantial majority in the eleventh, and even as late as the thirteenth, century to perhaps some 30 percent of the population in the sixteenth. The sustained play of the creative impulse is not characteristic of the beleaguered community. For the Christians who remained, communal preservation was all.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Syrian Christians in Muslim Society by Robert M. Haddad. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691030863
• ISBN 13: 9780691030869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 132