The Formation of Islam
Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800
JONATHAN P. BERKEY
Davidson College
Contents
vii
Preface page ix
Glossary xi
Maps xvi
Part I The Near East before Islam 1
1 Introduction 3
2 The religions of late antiquity 10
3 Arabia before Islam 39
4 The early seventh century 50
Part II The Emergence of Islam, 600–750 55
5 Approaches and problems 57
6 The origins of the Muslim community 61
7 Early Islam in the Near East 70
8 The Umayyad period 76
9 The beginnings of sectarianism 83
10 The non-Muslims of early Islam 91
11 The fiAbbasid revolution 102
Part III The Consolidation of Islam, 750–1000 111
12 Issues of Islamic identity 113
13 Religion and politics 124
14 Shifiism 130
15 The formation of Sunni traditionalism 141
16 Asceticism and mysticism 152
17 The non-Muslim communities 159
Part IV Medieval Islam, 1000–1500 177
18 The medieval Islamic Near East 179
19 Characteristics of the medieval Islamic world 184
20 A Sunni “revival”? 189
21 Common patterns in social and political organization 203
22 Modes of justice 216
23 The transmission of religious knowledge 224
24 Sufism 231
25 Popular religion 248
Epilogue 259
26 From medieval to modern Islam 261
Suggested reading 270
Index 276
viii Contents
The millenium or so before the rise of Islam in the early seventh century CE was
a period of enormously rich social and cultural development in the lands that form
the subject of this book. So much is probably true of any thousand-year interval of
human history, but this particular epoch was of special importance in that it saw the
crystallization of the religious traditions which have survived into the modern era,
and which formed the backdrop to the emergence of the new religion which traces
its origins to the preaching of Muhammad in western Arabia.
Marshall Hodgson, in his monumental history of The Venture of Islam, identified
the period between 800 and 200 BCE, which the German philosopher Karl
Jaspers had referred to as the “Axial Age,” as decisive in creating the world out of
which Islam eventually emerged.1
Throughout the Eurasian landmass, the Axial
Age saw the coalescence of a number of distinct cultures, regionally-based but
linked by both trading networks and a common core of principles: the GraecoRoman
or Mediterranean, the Indian, the Chinese. This was an era of leading
religious figures and of the production of foundational religious texts in all of
these regions: the teaching of Lao-Tzu, Buddha, the Greek philosophers, the
Hebrew prophets, and the compilation of the Upanishads in India. From the
standpoint of the religious traditions which are studied in this book, the year 200
BCE may be somewhat arbitrary, since the subsequent centuries were, at least in
the Near East, equally decisive regarding the articulation of identifiable religious
traditions. Indeed, it was the period between 200 BCE and 600 CE – the later
portion of what is usually called the “Hellenistic period” and the centuries which
comprise the era known as “late antiquity” – which saw the spread of those cultural
and religious patterns which are loosely identified as Hellenism; their impact
on virtually all social strata throughout the Near East; the fuller articulation of
rabbinic Judaism in the academies of Mesopotamia; and of course the career
of Jesus and the subsequent emergence of a distinctive Christian faith.
If the millenium or so prior to the rise of Islam had an “axial” character, so too,
in a geographic sense, did the region of the Near East. General histories of the Near
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
3
1
Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, in 3
volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1.111f.
East or of the world commonly speak of the Fertile Crescent, that arc of territory
stretching from the Nile River in Egypt to the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, as a
“crossroads,” as the meeting point of three continents, but the characterization is
no less true for its overuse. The cultures produced in this region, and in those
territories around its periphery (including Anatolia, the peninsula of Arabia, and
Iran as far as the Oxus River) which played such critical roles in its historical
development, mingled productively if not always entirely freely. Despite their
latent hostility to the “barbarians,” many Greeks believed that much of their
civilization had been borrowed from the East, and even if Athena was not exactly
“black” (in the somewhat polemical phrase of a controversial study), it is true that
Greek culture owed a considerable debt to the peoples of the east Mediterranean
littoral – for example, to the Phoenicians for their alphabet.2
The conquests of
Alexander the Great, and the subsequent penetration of Hellenism into Egypt,
Syria, Mesopotamia, and even lands further to the east, “pulled Hellenism’s center
of gravity sharply eastward.”3
The crossroads was not without its obstacles. In the centuries before the rise of
Islam, the Near East was dominated by two rival states. The Byzantine Empire,
with its capital in Constantinople, was the old Roman Empire, or what was left of
it. Across its eastern border, in the eastern half of the Fertile Crescent and in the
lands beyond, lay the empire of the Sasanians, an Iranian dynasty which had come
to power in the third century. The two states were bitter rivals, and for much of late
antiquity were at war. Their political rivalry, however, did not completely preclude
meaningful cultural contact. The Sasanians, even at the height of their conflict
with Rome in the sixth century, relentlessly borrowed from Byzantine culture
everything from bath-houses to systems of taxation, and the shah Khusrau I
Anushirvan (r. 531–579) gleefully welcomed the pagan Greek philosophers whom
the Roman emperor Justinian had expelled from their Academy in Athens.4
Looking back from the vantage point of the Muslim conquests, rather than from
the imperial capitals of the two empires, it is equally important to stress not just the
Fertile Crescent’s character as a crossroads, but also its political vulnerability to
powers on its periphery, its historical role as a “vortex that pulls inward and fuses
what lies around it.”5
In the millenium or so before the rise of Islam, the region
was usually dominated by states based just beyond its physical boundaries,
including the Roman and Sasanian empires. The conquests of the Muslim Arabs,
who in the seventh century burst into the Fertile Crescent from the remote and
inhospitable desert peninsula to the south, represent simply one more example of
far older historical patterns.
4 The Formation of Islam
2
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume 1: The
Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 1987).
3
Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 61–2.
4
Patricia Crone, “Kavd’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt,” Iran: Journal of the British Institute for
Persian Studies 29 (1991), 30; Averil Cameron, Agathias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 101;
Richard Frye, The Heritage of Persia (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963), 218.
5
A point made brilliantly by Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 17–18.
Central to the character of Near Eastern society in these centuries was the rise
of an urban, mercantile economy. Of course, no pre-modern society reached
anything close to the levels of urbanization in our industrial and post-industrial
world, and it is worth remembering at the outset that many of the religious
developments described in this book reached the ninety percent or more of the
population which was rural in attenuated and problematic form. Nonetheless, cities
there were, cities which were frequently dominated by merchants and others
involved in a commercial economy, and often it was in them, or in response to
their needs and uncertainties, that the religious developments which survived and
which seemed important to later generations took shape. It was in this period,
for example, that the use of currency became a widespread phenomenon, and it
is surely not coincidental that two of the more memorable episodes from the
accounts of Jesus’ life – his encounter with the moneychangers in the Jerusalem
temple, and his remark about rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s –
involved coins.
The urban commercial economy had a decisive impact on religious developments
of the era. In the first place, the existence of regional and trans-regional
trading networks discouraged cultural and religious parochialism. They helped to
make possible, for example, the emergence of traditions which claimed adherents
beyond any one city or locality: the household god, or the tutelary god of a city,
gradually was eclipsed by (or identified with) deities with a more catholic appeal.
Similarly, they encouraged the spread of religious ideas from one place to another.
It comes as no surprise that the missionary activities of several of the religions
of late antiquity – Manichaeism, for example, and later Islam – were closely
associated with merchants. Secondly, and more importantly, urban commercial
economies tended to make social inequities more conspicuous and brought social
injustices into sharper relief. It was to such problems, made worse by the permanently
shifting character of urban life, that many of the new religions addressed
themselves.
Although he seems to have glossed over some of the more nuanced questions
regarding economic structures and social class, Hodgson drew in a general way
upon the sociological analysis of Max Weber; and – if we allow ourselves at the
outset to paint with a rather broad brush – it will serve us as well, in part because
it informs some of the most basic questions about the origins and character of
Islam.6
Despite the significant differences between the religions of Buddha, the
rabbis, and others, they shared many characteristics. Arising against the background
of injustice, inequality, and social dislocation, they pointedly spoke to
Introduction 5
6
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), esp.
Chaps. 6 and 7. Note that Weber drew a distinction between the religious orientation of “commercial”
and “capitalist” classes, defining capitalism as “capital continuously and rationally employed in a
productive enterprise for the acquisition of profit” (92–3); it was the latter which were especially
troubled by social injustice and inequity, and so were attuned to religions of a profoundly ethical (and
frequently prophetic) character. His analysis (and that of Hodgson), however, included many
merchants under the “capitalist” heading.
the individual conscience, and so had a “confessional” character. Produced by
increasingly literate societies, they were frequently affirmed by scriptures, both
those for which a divine origin was claimed (the Torah, say, or the Koran) and
those of a more exegetical character (the Talmud), as well as those of a more
indeterminate nature (the Zoroastrian Avestan texts and the surviving commentaries
in which they are embedded). A corollary is that, however spontaneous
their origins (and frequently they originated as reactions against established
traditions), they tended to adopt increasingly systematic form, whether the formal
hieratic institutions of the Christian church, or the rabbis’ more decentralized and
“democratic” structures of authority.7
Despite radically different solutions to the
problems raised by an unjust world, they increasingly looked to a life after death,
or to some eschatological future, as the locus of justice and salvation. This was
true even of a religion such as Judaism, which, succumbing to the powerful
gravitational pull of late antique Hellenism, moved beyond the this-worldly focus
of its core Biblical texts.
Two general trends among the religions of the end of the classical and the late
antique worlds deserve special mention. First, they tended to be closely associated
with states and empires.8
The most obvious example is Christianity, whose
identification with the Roman Empire began under the emperor Constantine (d.
337) and was complete before the reign of his sixth-century successor Justinian.
The attachment of Rome’s great historical rival, the Sasanian Empire of Iran, to
Zoroastrianism developed at an uneven pace, but by the sixth and seventh centuries
was substantially complete, and the almost complete collapse of the Zoroastrian
community in the centuries following the Islamic conquests was due in part to the
destruction of the state structure which had supported it. Islam itself from the
beginning represented a close if problematic fusion of political and religious
authority, in which condition it once again constituted less a rupture with the
Christian Roman past than a continuation of one of the major themes of late
antiquity, an opportunity, as it were, to do Constantine one better.9
Here again, for
all its peculiarity, Judaism was not altogether different. Isolated Jewish kingdoms
or principalities emerged in various times and places – in Armenia, Chalcis,
Cappadocia, Iturea, and Abilene in the first century CE; among the Himyarites, in
southern Arabia, during the sixth century; or among the Khazars of Central Asia in
the eighth – and the Jewish revolts in Palestine in 66 and 132 CE represented a
striking amalgamation of political and religious authority.10
If the other great
religion to emerge from the late antique Near East, Manichaeism, failed to
6 The Formation of Islam
7
Cf. Peter Brown, “The Religious Crisis of the Third Century A.D.,” in Religion and Society in the
Age of Saint Augustine (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 83.
8
On this, see now Garth Fowden’s magisterial study, Empire to Commonwealth.
9
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 152f, drawing closely on Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds,
God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986).
10
Jacob Neusner, “The Conversion of Adiabene to Judaism: A New Perspective,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 83 (1964), 61. On the Jewish kingdom in southern Arabia, see Gordon Darnell Newby,
A History of the Jews of Arabia from Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam (Columbia, South
establish a lasting relationship with one of the states of the region, it was not for
lack of trying.
A second point concerns the universalist character and claims of the religions
of late antiquity. The adherents of the religions of late antiquity – or at least those
adherents who took their religion seriously – increasingly associated their faith
with a truth which applied to all the world, and not just to a particular people or
place. Surely one of the features of Christianity which appealed to Constantine and
his successors was its universalism, for it allowed the emperor to present himself
as the representative or instrument of a God who stood over all of humankind, a
God who could reveal to Constantine his sign and commend it to him as the banner
under which to carry out his military campaigns.11
This union of Roman state
and Christian religion, which reached fruition in the early Byzantine state, in fact
built upon a connection between religious truth and political power which was
implicit in the cult of the emperor as it developed during the centuries immediately
preceding Constantine’s conversion.12
The ideal of an association of universalist
faith and triumphal state percolated widely through late Roman society.
In a famous passage from his Christian cosmography, an early sixth-century
Alexandrian merchant named Cosmas glossed a verse from the Book of Daniel
which he took to refer to the rough coincidence of the establishment of the Roman
Empire and the birth of Christ.
For while Christ was yet in the womb, the Roman empire received its power from God
as the servant of the dispensation which Christ introduced, since at that very time the
accession was proclaimed of the unending line of the Augusti by whose command a
census was made which embraced the whole world. … The empire of the Romans thus
participates in the dignity of the Kingdom of the Lord Christ, seeing that it transcends,
as far as can be in this state of existence, every other power, and will remain
unconquered until the final consummation.13
And once again, the rise and success of Islam followed rather than digressed from
older patterns. It is doubtful that Islam began as anything more than the
monotheistic religion of the Arabs. Of course it did eventually become universalist;
the existence and permanence of a territorially enormous and explicitly Muslim
state probably made that transformation inevitable.
The social dimension was equally significant, as merchants crossing international
borders cultivated a truly ecumenical outlook. But more importantly,
monotheism itself must have contributed to the phenomenon of universalism, since
Introduction 7
Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 38f; on the Khazars, see EI2
, art. “Khazar” (by
W. Barthold and P. B. Golden); on the Palestinian revolts, see Fergus Millar, “Empire, Community
and Culture in the Roman Near East: Greeks, Syrians, Jews and Arabs,” Journal of Jewish Studies
38 (1987), 143–64, esp. 147–8.
11
The universalist claims of Christianity underlie a very interesting letter of Constantine’s to the
Persian emperor Shapur, expressing horror at Zoroastrian ritual and commending Iranian Christians
to the shah’s care. See Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987), 636–7.
12
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, esp. 38, 81–2, 87–8.
13
Cosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography, trans. J. W. McCrindle (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1897), 70–1.
the belief in a single god by definition constitutes a narrowing of the scope of what
constitutes truth.14
Polytheistic religious systems by their very nature acknowledge
a multiplicity of paths to truth, or salvation, or whatever is the goal of the religious
enterprise. The belief in a single god, by contrast, can easily become an assertion
that that deity can be understood and approached in only one way. And monotheism,
or at least a tendency toward belief in a single god, permeated the late
antique world, by no means exclusively in its Jewish or Christian form. The
various local and national religions, even the colorful and exuberant polytheism
of Egypt, were not immune to the force of the monotheistic ideal.
O God most glorious, called by many a name,
Nature’s great King, through endless years the same;
Omnipotence, who by thy just decree
Controllest all, hail, Zeus, for unto thee
Behooves thy creatures in all lands to call,
begins the famous “Hymn to Zeus” of the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes (d. 232
BCE).15
In the Graeco-Roman world, it was the philosophers whose monotheism
was most noticeable, but even explicitly polytheistic texts, such as the poems of
Homer, and the cultic polytheism of which they formed the basis, do not preclude
a more inclusive understanding of divinity in which localized and anthropomorphic
gods were merely particular and imperfect manifestations of a single
divine power.16
The situation in Arabia in this period was extremely complex,
but even there, on the remote periphery of the Mediterranean world, various
monotheisms were known in the years before the beginning of Muhammad’s
ministry.
From monotheism, it is but a short step to an explicit, and potentially militant,
universalism. The example of Judaism in this regard is somewhat problematic,
since Jewish monotheism was coupled with the association of Judaism with a
particular ethnic group. Even so, there was a strong universalizing streak in the
Judaism of late antiquity. One should not overstress the simplistic contrast between
the tolerant polytheism of the classical Mediterranean world and the more
repressive orthodoxies of the monotheistic faiths. On the other hand, the confessional
religions of late antiquity were by nature increasingly exclusive:
adherence to one automatically excluded identification with another, even if, as
we shall see, it was not always possible or easy to draw fine lines between one
8 The Formation of Islam
14
Cf. the remarks of Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” Numen 36
(1989), 16–42, esp. 23, and Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 106–7.
15
Essential Works of Stoicism, ed. Moses Hadas (New York: Bantam, 1965), 51.
16
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 38–41; Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 52; H. Idris Bell, Cults and Creeds in GraecoRoman
Egypt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1953), 1–24, esp. 7–16; E. R. Dodds, Pagan
and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius
to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 116–18; John Peter Kenney,
“Monotheistic and Polytheistic Elements in Classical Mediterranean Spirituality,” in Classical
Mediterranean Spirituality, ed. A. H. Armstrong (New York: Crossroads, 1986), 269–92, esp. 273.
tradition and the next. (This leaves open, furthermore, the analytically separate
issue of religious syncretism.)
Confessions which exclude others are a necessary ingredient of a world of
distinct religious identities and of competing faiths. And the world we are investigating
was, as much as anything else, a world of missionaries, proselytization, and
religious competition. Conversion and initiation – more generally, the making of
individual choices on matters of religion – were common themes in the religious
literature of the age, from Apuleius’s fictional account of the experiences of an
initiate into the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, to St. Augustine’s autobiographical
narrative of his own conversion to catholic Christianity and a life
of religious discipline. The dominant factor in the religious turmoil of late
antiquity was the rise of Christianity, and the competition between Christianity
and paganism was largely of Christian manufacture.17
But the period was more
generally an “age of anxiety.”18
In a work such as Augustine’s Confessions we
can trace the psychological dimensions of the religious stress characteristic of the
age. In what follows we will try to elucidate briefly the identities and parameters
of the traditions involved in the religious competition of late antiquity.
Introduction 9
17
Glen Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 5–6.
18
E. R. Dodds used the phrase to describe the third century, but it is just as descriptive of the ensuing
centuries. And cf. Brown, Religion and Society, 80: “The ‘Age of Anxiety’ became, increasingly, the
age of converts.”
Judaism
The religion of the people of Israel played a critical role in the religious matrix of
late antiquity. Jews constituted a significant minority of the population in many
Mediterranean towns, and Judaism had an impact on the religious lives of many
non-Jews as well. It was out of Judaism that Christianity first arose, and at least
partly through a bitter dispute with its mother faith that the new religion defined
itself. As we shall see, the relationship between Judaism and Islam was just as
close. Nor were the older pagan traditions immune from the influence of the
first of the major monotheistic faiths. Nonetheless, reconstructing the history of
Judaism in the Near East in the centuries before and after the rise of Islam is
difficult, given the nature of the surviving historical record; much of the story has
to be pieced together from sources hostile to the Jews and their faith.
The God of Israel was known throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean
worlds, thanks to the widespread dispersal of his worshipers. In part their
dispersion resulted from the successive deportations of Jews from Palestine, under
the Assyrians and Babylonians and, in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion in the
second century CE, the Romans. By the rise of Islam, for example, the Jewish
community of Babylonia was well over one thousand years old. But there was
also considerable voluntary migration, especially to flourishing cities such as
Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in northern Syria. In the early first century BCE,
the Sibylline oracle had commented that Jews could be found throughout the
known world, an observation repeated in a somewhat boastful letter of King Herod
Agrippa to the Roman emperor Caligula. Jerusalem, he declared, is
the mother city, not of one country Judaea but of most of the others in virtue of the
colonies sent out at divers times to the neighbouring lands of Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria,
the part of Syria called the Hollow and the rest as well and the lands lying far apart,
Pamphylia, Cilicia, most of Asia up to Bithynia and the corners of Pontus, similarly also
into Europe, Thessaly, Boeotia, Macedonia, Aetolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth, and most of
the best parts of Peloponnese. And not only are the mainlands full of Jewish colonies
but also the most highly esteemed of the islands Euboea, Cyprus and Crete. I say nothing
of the countries beyond the Euphrates, for except for a small part they all, Babylon
CHAPTER 2
The religions of late antiquity
10
and of the other satrapies those where the land within their confines is highly fertile,
have Jewish inhabitants.1
Several of these far-flung Jewish communities deserve a closer look. Jews had
settled, of course in Palestine, but also throughout the Graeco-Roman world, as the
apostle Paul well knew. One of the most important Jewish communities in the
Mediterranean region was found in Egypt. A permanent Jewish presence in Egypt
dated back to at least the sixth century BCE, with the establishment of a mercenary
garrison on the Elephantine island near modern Aswan. The Jewish community in
Egypt was extremely diverse. Many of the Jews of Egypt were, or had as their
forebears, soldiers, as the settlement of Jewish military colonies continued
throughout the Ptolemaic period. By the early first century CE, the Alexandrian
Jewish philosopher Philo estimated the total Jewish population of Egypt at one
million; Jews were found in all the major towns, in the Delta, the Thebaid, and
the Fayyum. Communities of Samaritans, too, could be found scattered through
the country, from the mid-third century BCE through at least the end of the
Islamic Middle Period. Above all, Jews were found in Alexandria, the capital of
Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, in which they formed a distinct and self-regulating
community.2
Herod Agrippa’s apparent pride in his people reflected an extroverted enthusiasm
which the Jews of the Mediterranean world shared with the adherents of
other religions in the Hellenistic period. In light of what came later, it is worth
recalling that many Jews participated freely in the religious dialogue and
experimentation which characterized the centuries just before and at the start of the
Common Era. Hellenism was a powerful cultural current, one which pulled many
Jews into its wake. Many Jews had become speakers of Greek – hence the need for
the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, produced in that
most Hellenistic of cities, Alexandria, in the third century BCE. Moreover, the
intellectuals among them (such as the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo)
engaged in sustained exchange with their pagan colleagues, an exchange through
which the Jews sought to explain and justify their traditions and their faith. No less
a figure than the patriarch of the Palestinian Jewish community maintained a
friendly correspondence with the pagan rhetor Libanius in Antioch in the fourth
century. Their exchange concerned, in part, the patriarch’s son, who had been a
student of one of Libanius’ pupils, but had failed to complete his studies. No
The religions of late antiquity 11
1
Philo, The Embassy to Gaius, trans. F. H. Colson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1962) (Loeb Classical Library, Philo, vol. 10), 143; cited in Emil Schürer, The History of the
Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C. – A.D. 135), new edition by Geza Vermes, Fergus
Millar, and Martin Goodman (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 3:4–5. On the dispersal of the Jews
generally, see Schürer, 3:1–86.
2
On the Jewish community of Egypt, see Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, 3:38–60; H. Idris
Bell, Cults and Creeds of Graeco-Roman Egypt (Liverpool, 1953), 25–49; J. M. Modrzejewski, The
Jews of Egypt: From Ramses II to Emperor Hadrian (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society,
1995), 161–225.
matter, the pagan counseled his Jewish friend: “perhaps it will be profitable for
him to see many cities – as it was for Odysseus.”3
There was already a pronounced element of “judeophobia” in the attitudes of
many pagans to their Jewish neighbors and their exclusive, monotheistic faith.
The tensions were in part theological. Many pagans could not fathom or appreciate
the resolutely aniconic character of the Jewish understanding of God, which made
it difficult to fit him into the flexible and expandable pantheon of recognized
deities. (Some tried nonetheless: Plutarch, for example, identified Yahweh with
the Greek god Dionysos.) But the tensions also had a social dimension. Some
non-Jews, for example, were perplexed by particular Jewish practices, such as
circumcision and their refusal to work on the Sabbath, by which the Jews selfconsciously
set themselves apart from their neighbors. These tensions and misunderstandings
led to accusations that the Jews harbored a deeply-rooted
indifference, or even hostility, to non-Jews, and at times to outbursts of anti-Jewish
violence.4
Despite an underlying level of hostility among both pagans and, increasingly,
Christians, Judaism had its appeal for Gentiles, and not only in its Christian form.
The Jewish historian Josephus reports that the empress Poppaea, second wife of
Nero, felt the attraction of Judaism, and interceded with her husband on its behalf.5
Jewish monotheism was compelling, the Jewish moral law commanded respect
and admiration, and Jewish theology and ritual stressed the expiation for sin which
spoke directly to the religious psyche of late antiquity (and which also contributed
to the popularity of the various “mystery” cults). Given the sheer size of the Jewish
population and its presence throughout the Mediterranean world, Judaism had
distinct political advantages, too, another point worth remembering in light of
later conditions. This was particularly true in southwest Asia, given the presence
there of Palestine and of the significant Jewish population in Babylonia: the
conversion of the ruling family of Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia in the first
century can be understood at least in part as an attempt to capitalize on the political
advantages of being Jewish.6
This last point raises the vexing problem of conversion to Judaism, Jewish
proselytization, and the broader issue of Jewish universalism. It is probably best to
begin by stepping behind the more sharply-delineated religious boundaries of later
centuries, and remembering that Judaism as we know it was, like the other
12 The Formation of Islam
3
Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries
of the Common Era (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978) (Society of Biblical Literature:
Sources for Biblical Study, no. 13), 11–12.
4
See Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Towards Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
5
Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, 3:78; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.196, trans. Louis H.
Feldman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965) (Loeb Classical Library),
9:493; idem, Vita 16, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1926) (Loeb Classical Library), 1:9.
6
Jacob Neusner, “The Conversion of Adiabene to Judaism: A New Perspective,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 83 (1964), 60–66.
religious traditions which emerged from late antiquity, still in the process of
formation. Beyond the particularism of the notion of a people specially chosen by
God, there was a strong universalizing streak in Jewish literature and thought,
represented most obviously in biblical passages such as those of the “Second”
Isaiah about the Jewish people constituting a “light to the nations.” Not all Jews
responded favorably to this theme, but among more Hellenized Jews, such as
Philo, it was strong, and contributed to the dialogue in which he and others
engaged with their pagan neighbors. It is doubtful that Judaism in the Hellenistic
and late antique periods produced as active a missionary movement as did, say,
Christianity, but proselytization was known and approved, even by some of the
rabbis whose opinions are expressed in the Talmud, at least through the fourth
century CE.7
The degree of conversion varied considerably. Full conversion,
including (for males) circumcision, was possible and not unusual, although some
of the rabbis accorded converts a kind of second class status, and late Roman
legislation, such as that outlawing the circumcision of Gentiles, sporadically
limited proselytes’ opportunities, at least when enforced.8
But other Gentiles
attached themselves to Judaism and to Jewish communities in less categorical
fashion, for example, by substituting a purifactory bath for the more off-putting act
of circumcision. There has been considerable debate about the meaning of the term
“God-fearers,” which ancient sources and inscriptions use to refer to groups of
Gentiles who attached themselves to synagogues, and who followed some Jewish
customs but not all of the law; but whether or not the term was a technical one and
the God-fearers formed a distinct grade of Judaizing Gentiles, it indicates both the
appeal of Judaism to non-Jews and a significant level of inter-communal exchange
of beliefs, values, and practices.9
Josephus described Syria as that region of the ancient world in which Jews
constituted the largest proportion of the population. But by the fourth century,
the cultural and probably the demographic center of Judaism lay to the east,
in Mesopotamia. The Jewish community there was old, dating back to the
Achaemenid empire, but it grew substantially in late antiquity, in part because the
Sasanian emperors encouraged Jewish immigration from the rival (and considerably
more hostile) Roman Empire, and in part through a process of
conversion among the native Aramaean population with whom the Jews shared a
common vernacular. Estimates for the size of the Jewish population in Iraq have
The religions of late antiquity 13
7
On late Jewish proselytization, see Marcel Simon, Verus Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1986), 270–305, and Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and
Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 383–415.
8
On conversion, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Crossing the Boundary and Becoming a Jew,” Harvard
Theological Review 82 (1989), 13–33; idem, “The Rabbinic Conversion Ceremony,” Journal of
Jewish Studies 41 (1990), 177–203; Martin Goodman, “Proselytzing in Rabbinic Judaism,” Journal
of Jewish Studies 40 (1989), 175–85. On fourth- and fifth-century Roman legislation aimed at
preventing conversion to Judaism, see Simon, Verus Israel, 291–3.
9
On this subject, see Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, 3.150–76 (by Fergus Millar); Garth
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 65–72; Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, 288–415.
ranged from 500,000 in the third century to as much as two million in the year 500,
although the number of Jews probably declined somewhat in ensuing decades
as the pace of conversion to Christianity grew.10
The population of a city such as
Mahoza was so thoroughly Jewish that the rabbis debated whether the very gates
of the city did not require a mezuzah (a small case containing parchment on which
was written short Biblical quotations, which Jews traditionally fixed to the
doorposts of houses). The size and prestige of the Babylonian community grew at
the direct expense of the Jewish community of Palestine. That latter community
suffered of course in the wake of the Bar Kochba rebellion, when Jews were
forbidden to live within the city of Jerusalem, a prohibition periodically renewed
by the Roman emperors, and also from the sharp rise of antisemitic feeling in the
later Roman Empire. Rabbi Judah bar Ezekiel confirmed the eminence and
authority of the Babylonian community in declaring, “Whosoever emigrates from
Babylonia to Palestine breaks a positive biblical commandment, because it is
written ‘they shall be carried to Babylon, and there shall they be until the day that
I remember them, saith the Lord’ [Jer. 27.22].”11
Viewed with the advantage of historical hindsight, Rabbi Judah’s confidence
was not misplaced. The experience of Mesopotamian Jews in the centuries before
Islam was in fact critical, both for the articulation of Judaism as it has been known
since (as it was largely in the rabbinical academies of Iraq that Jewish law took
shape), and also in defining the social and political structures which characterized
the Near Eastern Jewish experience into the modern period. Under the Sasanian
rulers, Jews were afforded a high degree of communal autonomy, an arrangement
which in many ways foreshadowed the regime of self-contained communities,
rooted in religious identity, which helped to shape the social structure of medieval
Islamic cities. At the rise of the Sasanian empire, the community was led by the
exilarch, a member of a family claiming Davidic descent. Operating as a sort
of “Jewish vassal prince,” the exilarch represented the community before the
Sasanian emperor, who allowed him to levy taxes, police the community,
administer justice, and even, on occasion, raise troops to serve in the imperial
army. His authority was shared, however, with the rabbis, who first came to
Mesopotamia from Palestine in the wake of the Bar Kochba revolt. Their authority
was based, not on descent, but on the claim that they possessed and transmitted an
oral law, parallel to the written law, which they traced back to Moses. By the
fourth and fifth centuries, the rabbis had created an institutional structure for
instruction and learning through which their interpretation of Jewish law came to
be dominant, not just in Iraq, but among Jews throughout the diaspora. And by at
least the end of the sixth century, the leaders of those schools, the geonim, had
14 The Formation of Islam
10
On the size of the Jewish population in Iraq, see Jacob Neusner, Talmudic Judaism in Sasanian
Babylonia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 95; Michael G. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 306–8.
11
Cited in Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edition (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1952–) 2:204–5, 208.
emerged as authoritative spokesmen on questions regarding law, the questions
which marked the Jews off as a people and gave them a separate identity.
There is a curious tension in the nature of authority within the Sasanian Jewish
community, an authority which was both secular and religious but which could
never thoroughly dominate either the sacred or profane sphere of peoples’ lives –
a tension which in fact was characteristic of medieval Near Eastern institutions of
power. The exilarch, for example, functioned at times almost as a courtier of the
Sasanian emperor, yet his authority rested in the final analysis on the claim of
Davidic descent. Similarly, the rabbis’ role as authoritative interpreters of the law
had a political dimension which eventually brought them into conflict with the
exilarch. The dimensions of that conflict are not entirely clear, but it resulted in the
eclipse of the office of the exilarch by the end of the Sasanian period, the rabbis,
led by the geonim, emerging as both authoritative interpreters of the law and
representatives of the Jewish community.12
(The denouement of this drama was
played out, as we shall see, under the caliph al-Mansur in the late eighth century.)
And the rabbis’ victory was decisive, both for the internal character of the
Jewish community and for its relations with the broader society of which it formed
a part. The Jewish community of Iraq was socially diverse, consisting of townsmen
and scholars but overwhelmingly of laborers, peasants, and slaves, and as such
knew considerable interaction with the non-Jewish communities of the country.
Interaction bred cultural influence – Iranian influence, for example, can be traced
in Jewish mysticism and in the magic which came increasingly to be associated
with Jews – and social interpenetration, such as intermarriage and conversion.
Only in such an open world can the considerable growth in the size of the Jewish
community in late antiquity be understood. But the rabbis brought a more refined
definition of what it meant to be Jewish, one that required the setting of sharper
communal boundaries. It was they, with their concerns about the law and ritual
purity, who discouraged contact between Jews and non-Jews, who grew skeptical
of conversion to Judaism, and who frowned upon intermarriage.13
Their victory
and their concerns were signs of the times. Their anxieties about the social mixing
of adherents of different religious communities were shared by the Zoroastrian
priests who grew increasingly identified with the Sasanian state, and reflected the
more general process by which religious identities in late antiquity crystallized
around a few major traditions.14
The religions of late antiquity 15
12
On the exilarch, the rabbinate, and on the structure of the Jewish community in Mesopotamia in
general, see Jacob Neusner, “Jews in Iran,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3: The Seleucid,
Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 909–23; Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 306–31; Baron, A Social and Religious
History of the Jews, 2.196–8.
13
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 312–14. The Talmud, however, does not speak with a
unified voice. Some rabbis remained warmly disposed to proselytization. See Simon, Verus Israel,
274–8.
14
A process which Baron referred to as “closing the ranks.” See A Social and Religious History of
the Jews, 2.129–71.
The most important aspect of that process is that it was a process, a process
which occupied the whole of the late antique period, and one which was certainly
incomplete, for Judaism as well as for other religions, in the early seventh century.
Above all, the process grew out of a dialectic involving the various faith traditions,
as each attempted to define itself more sharply against the others. The process was
probably sharpest in the territories of the newly Christianized Roman Empire.
Under the Ptolemaic and Seleucid emperors and their pagan Roman successors,
Jews had been afforded a fair degree of freedom in the practice of their religion.
There were exceptions, of course, such as the efforts of the Seleucid Antiochus
Epiphanes to suppress Judaism (which efforts sparked the Maccabaean revolt in
the second century BCE), or the reprisals carried out by the Romans in response
to the rebellions in Palestine in 66–70 and 132–135 CE, which resulted in the
destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the banishing of Jews from that city.
Spontaneous outbursts of violence against the Jews, conducted not by state
authorities but by urban mobs, betray an underlying strain of hostility to Judaism,
probably reflecting an impatience with Jewish exceptionalism (as in practices like
circumcision, or in the Jewish refusal to participate in the civic cults), which
hostility must be set against the philo-semitic feelings of others attracted to Jewish
monotheism and doctrines of redemption. But on an official level at least, the Jews
formed a relatively favored community. They were, for example, by and large not
required to participate in the imperial cult. One mark of their status resides in
occasional instances in which Christians suffering from one of the outbreaks of
Roman persecution converted to Judaism in order to protect themselves.15
Even in
Palestine, which was quite naturally the center of much opposition to the Roman
political order, Judaism remained licit and active, at least outside of Jerusalem.16
Under such conditions, religious exchange could take place at a variety of
levels. Some Jews, for example, continued actively to proselytize as late as the
fourth century, despite the growing strength of Christianity and also the sharpened
hostility of the rabbis, one of whom declared that “a gentile who studies the
Torah deserves capital punishment.”17
Christians and Jews (as well as pagans)
shared what has been called a “religious koiné,” that is to say, similar patterns of
religious belief and behavior, especially but not exclusively on the level of
“popular religion”: magic, and the belief in spiritual beings, angels, and demons.18
Christians continued to visit synagogues, or gather for prayer and scripture
readings on the Jewish sabbath, or be buried in Jewish cemeteries, despite the
efforts of the early church councils to draw sharper lines between Christians and
Jews. Communities of Jewish-Christians survived for decades, even centuries,
16 The Formation of Islam
15
Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, 3.125.
16
Stroumsa, “Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” 24; Saul Lieberman, “Palestine in the Third
and Fourth Centuries,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 36 (1945–6), 329–70. On the relatively
privileged position of Jews more generally, see Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, 3.114–25.
17
Cited in Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2.148.
18
Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” Numen 36 (1989), 16–42,
esp. 21.
after a distinctive Christian church and faith had emerged. They puzzled many,
including the patriarch Cyril of Jerusalem. In a sermon in 348, he remarked that
these individuals worshiped Jesus Christ, yet refused the name “Christian” and
insisted upon calling themselves “Jews.”19
But despite the exchange, boundaries between the communities were beginning
to harden. Even their apparent sharing of a common scripture served to drive
Christians and Jews apart, since the theology underlying the Christian identification
of the “old” and “new” testaments was irrelevant, even antithetical, to the
rabbinical understanding of a dual scripture, written and oral, both revealed at
Sinai and possessed in their entirety only by the rabbis.20
To some degree, the
rabbis welcomed and contributed to this process of separation and distinction, for
it meshed with their efforts to refine the law and solidify their control over the
Jewish community. But even more important was the attitude of the Roman state.
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the early fourth century did not
transform the empire overnight into an instrument of Christianization, but it did set
in motion the gradual merger of the interests of the Roman state and the Christian
faith (or at least certain elements and traditions within the Christian church). By
380, the emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion of the
empire. The organized pagan cults were the first to feel the impact of this
identification of church and state, but increasingly the Jews, too, felt its onerous
weight. In 409 and 438, Jews who attempted to convert Christians were declared
subject to capital punishment. The state began to interfere in the practice of Jewish
law, subjecting Jews to Roman law in matters such as marriage and inheritance,
thereby undermining the juridical foundations of Jewish identity and the autonomy
which the Jews had enjoyed under pagan Rome. The assault on Judaism aimed at
its bedrock: under Justinian, the state even tried to regulate ritual in the Jewish
synagogue, by stipulating which versions of scripture could be read, and over the
sixth century instances of forced baptism increased. These developments were
the social manifestations of a changing theological climate, in which religions
claimed for themselves authority to define the parameters of truth, parameters
which applied to and circumscribed the lives of all. Judaism, given its proximity to
the origins and basis of Christianity, was especially problematic for Christian
theologians and rulers, whose efforts to separate and control the Jews perhaps
reflected what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor difference.” Hence
Justinian’s efforts to force Jews to postpone their observance of the Passover, so
that Judaizing Christians might be prevented from celebrating Easter on the Jewish
holiday. And hence the term “Jew” became in Christian polemic one of abuse,
applied by Christians to all – pagans and Christian sectarians as well as Jews – who
deviated from the norm.21
The religions of late antiquity 17
19
Stroumsa, “Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” 28.
20
Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 128–45.
21
On the sharpening of communal boundaries and the worsening position of the Jews, see Baron,
A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2.129–214, and 3.3–18; Peter Brown, The World of Late
Most accounts of the Jews under Sasanian rule have assumed that they fared
considerably better than their co-religionists to the west. Peter Brown, for
example, has piquantly observed that “[a]t a time when the emperor Justinian was
laying down which version of the Scriptures the Jews should be allowed to read in
the synagogues of his empire, the rabbis of Ctesiphon were free to conduct a
vigorous polemic against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Virgin
Birth.”22
Several of the Sasanian monarchs acquired reputations as friends of the
Jews, reputations which have left traces in the Talmud. The Jews of Mesopotamia,
for example, endeared themselves to Shapur II (309–79) by their refusal to
cooperate with the Roman emperor Julian during his invasion of the Sasanian
Empire. Yazdigird I (399–420) is reputed to have been on familiar terms with
the Jews and even with their scriptures, although the story that he had a Jewish
wife may be apocryphal.23
As Judaism was increasingly defined as hostile to
Christianity and to the Roman state, Jews could even identify their interests with
those of Rome’s great historical rival, the Sasanian Empire, as we shall see.
But the Jews of Mesopotamia also experienced the sharpening of communal
boundaries in the centuries before the rise of Islam. In both tenor and substance,
Judaism differed profoundly from the Zoroastrianism which grew more closely
identified with the Sasanian state. On certain matters of ritual touching intimate
areas of human life and expectations, divergence in practice could create real
feelings of uneasiness or even revulsion: marriage, for example (in particular
the Zoroastrian acceptance of consanguinous unions), or death rites (Jewish inhumation,
which seemed to Zoroastrians to defile the earth, versus the Zoroastrian
practice of exposing the dead to the elements, which could be construed as
threatening the prospects for bodily resurrection).24
Tensions of this sort may have
lain behind outbreaks of violence such as one that occurred in Isfahan in the
second half of the fifth century, in which, following a slanderous accusation that
the Jews had attacked two Zoroastrian priests, half the Jewish population of the
city was massacred and its children turned over as slaves to serve the fire-temples.
But the more important nexus for the worsening of the position of Jews in the
Sasanian Empire was a political one. Here again, it is important to stress that Jews
did not always act as a politically passive minority. They were caught up in some
way in the confused events associated with the Mazdakite movement in the
Sasanian empire in the late fifth and early sixth centuries (on which, see below);
their involvement issued at one point in a rebellion led by the exilarch Mar Zutra
II, who established for seven years an independent Jewish state in Mahoza, until it
was overrun by the Iranians and Mar Zutra captured and beheaded. During another
18 The Formation of Islam
Antiquity, AD 150–750 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 172–187; Stroumsa,
“Religious Contacts in Byzantine Palestine,” passim; J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh
Century: The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 345–8;
Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (NewYork: Schocken Books,
1971), 19–41.
22
Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 165.
23
Neusner, “Jews in Iran,” 915.
24
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 296.
rebellion later in the sixth century, some communities of Jews backed the losing
claimant to the Sasanian throne, which again led to pogroms. At any rate, by the
end of the Sasanian period, the Jews of Mesopotamia had known massacres and
meddling in their internal affairs by the imperial authorities; the office of the
exilarch had been periodically suppressed, and the academies which were so
central to Jewish religious life had been temporarily closed.25
Christianity
The development which contributed most to the process by which the religions of
late antiquity defined themselves more sharply was the rise of Christianity. As
a historical matter, it would be meaningless to say that Christianity caused the
process; but that process involved a dialogue, and most of the participants in that
dialogue were Christian. The dialogue was not always a friendly one – quite the
contrary. One of the characteristic features of the religious literature of late
antiquity is its highly polemical nature. Polemics helped the traditions to define
themselves, but also betrayed the underlying uncertainties and competition which
fueled them in the first place.26
Judaism, as we have seen, was increasingly a target of Christian polemic, as
the young religion sought to differentiate itself from its parent. No doubt Jews
participated in the exchange, but it is significant that surviving examples of JewishChristian
polemic come exclusively from the Christian side. Christians continued
to feel a need to stake out an independent identity well into the common era.
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch around the turn of the first century, composed letters
condemning, not Jewish Christians, but Gentile Christians who adopted Jewish
practices. His concerns match those of John Chrysostom, prelate of Antioch some
three centuries later. Chrysostom’s sermons suggest that many Christians in
Antioch harbored an infatuation with Judaism, reflected in Christian participation
in Jewish festivals, and attendance at synagogues. The preacher claimed even to
know at least one Antiochan Christian who identified himself as such, but who had
submitted to circumcision.27
It is easy to condemn the rhetorical violence of
Chrysostom’s sermons for their use of what we would now identify as antisemitic
images – he labels Jews, for instance, as “Christ-killers” – but they should also be
read as reflecting the profound anxieties generated by a drawn-out process through
which the separate identities of the different faiths were confirmed.
The religions of late antiquity 19
25
On the worsening condition of the Jews in Mesopotamia and other Iranian territories, see Geo
Widengren, “The Status of the Jews in the Sassanian Empire,” Iranica Antiqua 1 (1961), 117–62.
26
Averil Cameron, “The Eastern Provinces in the Seventh Century A.D.: Hellenism and the
Emergence of Islam,” Hellenismos: Quelques Jalons pour une Histoire de l’Identité Grecque, ed.
S. Said (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 287–313, esp. 307.
27
Meeks and Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch, 20, 30–4; and cf. Robert Wilken, John
Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
Paganism too felt the sting of Christian attack. Pagans had not always treated
Christians kindly, as the many martyrs might attest. And pagans too participated
in the war of words between the faiths. To cite just one instance, one which may
have been known to the emperor Constantine: Hierocles, one of the emperor
Diocletian’s chief lieutenants during the persecutions of the early fourth century,
authored a treatise denigrating Christ and denouncing the Christian belief in his
divinity, a treatise which prompted an extended reply from the church historian
(and later Constantine’s adviser) Eusebius.28
But Christian memory may have
over-stressed the extent and significance of pagan persecution.29
Certainly once the
Roman emperors adopted Christianity, as a practical matter pagans were no longer
in a position to cause serious disruption to Christian life and worship, the brief
campaign of the pagan emperor Julian against Christianity in the mid-fourth
century notwithstanding.
On the contrary, after the early fourth century, it was Christians who persecuted
pagans. Constantine’s conversion did not lead to the sudden eclipse of paganism,
but it did ratchet up the rhetoric of Christian hostility. Constantine’s own religious
policy presents a somewhat contradictory mien, and historians have come to
radically different conclusions about the degree of his personal and political
commitment to Christianity. A judicious reading of the evidence may suggest that,
while Constantine’s conversion was sincere, the overriding goal of his religious
policy was to promote peace within the empire, a peace to heal the wounds left by
the persecution instigated by his pagan predecessor, Diocletian, and a peace built
around a tolerant consensus of all those (pagans included) who acknowledged a
supreme god under whose auspices Constantine ruled.30
Constantine closed a
number of pagan temples, but he also at one point exiled the staunchly orthodox
bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (albeit for reasons having nothing to do with
theology). On the other hand, he himself publically referred to paganism as an
“error,” and to ritual sacrifice as a “foul pollution,” and had his agents break up
pagan statues and expose the rubbish with which they were filled.31
Intentionally
or not, his words and actions inspired others, especially bishops and monks, to take
up the cudgel, verbal and literal, which they did with increasing vigor. After a
period of improved fortunes for pagans under Julian (r. 361–3) and in the years
immediately following his death, the pace and tenor of Christian assaults on pagan
cults and temples picked up. Imperial legislation called for the closure and
20 The Formation of Islam
28
H. A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius’
Tricennial Orations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 68. Eusebius’ treatise is
included at the end of the Loeb volume of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. F. C.
Conybeare in two volumes (London: William Heinemann, 1912), 2.484–605.
29
See, for example, Peter Brown’s comments on W. H. C. Frend’s study, Martyrdom and Persecution
in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus (Oxford: Blackwell,
1965), in “Approaches to the Religious Crisis of the Third Century A.D.,” in Religion and Society
in the Age of Saint Augustine (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 86–7.
30
Drake, In Praise of Constantine, 61–74. Robin Lane Fox, by contrast, stresses Constantine’s
commitment to the new faith and his particular concern with Christian unity: Pagans and Christians
(New York: Knopf, 1987), 609–62.
31
Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 666, 673.
dismantling of specific shrines and, in 435, for their general destruction; but it was
bishops and, especially in rural areas, unruly monks who led the charge, often in
advance of the law. The destruction of the famous Serapeum in Alexandria in 391,
for example, was instigated by the city’s bishop. By the early fifth century, the
movement was in full swing. Bishops seized the moment and, capitalizing on the
anxieties stirred up by the violence they had provoked, frequently made certain
that attacks on temples were followed by the formal mass conversion of the pagans
who had worshiped in them. For example Porphyry, bishop of Gaza from 395 to
420, having overseen the destruction of a pagan temple, welcomed the mass
conversion of the terrified pagans, over-riding the objections of fellow churchmen
that the converts were driven by fear rather than conviction.32
This last point is especially significant. The growing level of Christian hostility
is surprising, as late antique paganism shared much with the new religion of
Christianity, both on an intellectual level (pagan theology having grown increasingly
monotheistic) and on that of popular belief and practice. The emphasis
on conversion suggests once again the growing importance to the men and women
of late antiquity of formal expressions of religious identity. In that may lie
Christianity’s greatest legacy to the world which, in the seventh century, Islam
inherited.
Christians raised more insistently than others the question of religious identity.
“I cannot call myself anything else than what I am,” said the young North African
martyr Perpetua (d. ca. 203), “a Christian.”33
It is deeply ironical, therefore, that
the question of Christian identity should have proved so troublesome to the
Christians themselves.34
Of all the major religions to have emerged from late
antiquity, Christianity had the misfortune to be the one which placed the greatest
emphasis on doctrine and theology. The principal issues, concerning the nature of
Christ, ironically began to emerge just at the moment of Christianity’s triumph
through the conversion of Constantine, in the form of the Arian controversy. They
continued to plague the church through the rise of Islam, and probably contributed
to the frustrations felt by Muhammad and his followers at the apparent doctrinal
disorder of and internecine squabbling within the Christian community. That
the apparent triumph of a monotheistic religion should be accompanied by
increasingly bitter debates over doctrinal issues may not be coincidental. As one
historian has recently observed, “where polytheism diffuses divinity and defuses
The religions of late antiquity 21
32
Mark the Deacon, Vie de Porphyre, Évêque de Gaza, trans. Henri Grégoire and M.-A. Kugener
(Paris: Société d’Éditions “Les Belles Lettres”, 1930), 72–4; Garth Fowden, “Bishops and Temples
in the Eastern Roman Empire A.D. 320–435,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 29 (1978), 53–78.
33
Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. James W. Halporn (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania:
Thomas Library, 1984), 3.2; Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70.
34
Judith Herrin points out that most histories of early Christianity adopt, intentionally or otherwise, the
viewpoint of the “orthodox” church which ultimately triumphed, at least in the West. Doing so can
obscure “the tentative and hesitant, divisive and competitive aspects of early Christian communities,
their idiosyncracies in practice and belief, in short, the relative lack of uniformity.” The Formation
of Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 54–5f.
the consequences, if not always the intensity, of debate about its nature by
providing a range of options, monotheism tends to focus divinity and ignite
debates by forcing all the faithful, with their potentially infinite varieties of
religious thought and behavior, into the same mold, which sooner or later must
break.”35
This is not the place for anything more than a limited assault on the
dizzying edifice of the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.
The social and historical significance of those controversies, however, is
another matter.36
To consider the impact of the Christological controversies on Christian identity
and the nexus of political and religious authority in the centuries before Islam, let
us look in closer detail at the situation in Egypt.37
By the end of the second century,
Christianity was gaining ground throughout the country. A number of factors
contributed to its appeal to the population, including several doctrinal parallels
with the late pagan cults patronized both by native Egyptians and by Greeks
and Romans resident in the country, such as their emphasis on redemption and
sacramental mysteries, and perhaps especially the traditional Egyptian preoccupation
with immortality (as in, for example, the popular cult of Osiris, god of
the Nile and king of the dead). By the fourth century, the church was wellestablished,
with a network of churches down to the village level, and a growing
body of Christian literature written in or translated into Coptic, the language of the
native population. At the time of the conversion of Constantine, perhaps half the
inhabitants of Egypt professed Christianity; by the early fifth century, the figure
probably reached eighty percent.38
Egyptian Christianity had a tremendous impact
on the faith beyond the Nile valley, most obviously in monasticism, whose roots lie
in the Christian ascetics (such as the hermit Antony) who fled to the Egyptian
desert and in the coenobitic movement associated with figures such as Pachomius.39
But Egyptian influence was more subtle, as well. The ecumenical council of
Ephesus in 431 declared Mary the Theotokos, the “God-Bearer,” and in doing so,
it “ratified the fervor of the Copts, who had worshiped her as such.”40
Egyptians
were by no means alone in their feelings for Mary, of course. On the other hand, it
may be worthy of note that one of the earliest Church fathers to enunciate a
doctrine of Mary as Theotokos was Athanasius, and that the major proponent of
22 The Formation of Islam
35
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 106–7.
36
The Christological controversies are treated in any number of doctrinal histories of the early church.
Among the best are Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), and W.
H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia, 1984). A non-Chalcedonian point of view is
given in Aziz S. Atiya’s History of Eastern Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1968), although this work is somewhat sentimental and uncritical.
37
On early Christianity in Egypt, see C. Wilfred Griggs, Early Egyptian Christianity: From Its Origins
to 451 CE (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), and the still serviceable work of H. Idris Bell, Cults and Creeds
in Graeco-Roman Egypt (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 78–105.
38
Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 278–81.
39
The best study of early monasticism is still Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City: An Introduction to
the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire (Oxford: Blackwell,
1966).
40
Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 143.
the doctrine at Ephesus was Cyril; both Athanasius and Cyril were patriarchs of
Alexandria. Moreover, what became the principal medieval image of Mary –
suckling the infant Jesus – can be traced back iconographically to Egyptian
depictions of the goddess Isis nursing her infant son Horus.41
Ultimately, of course, the controversy over Mary as Theotokos was a Christological
issue, and foreshadowed a larger crisis which plagued the Church as a
result of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Council’s declaration that Christ
was both perfect God and perfect man, made known to us in two natures, angered
those who came to be known as Monophysites, who insisted on the full mystical
union of God and man in a single nature in the person of Christ. Many Egyptians
passionately embraced the Monophysite position, as did the churches of Armenia
and Ethiopia, and most of the Christians of Syria. Consequently, the aftermath of
the conciliar decision was a permanent doctrinal rupture between most Christians
of those regions and those adhering to the orthodox or “Melkite” (imperial)
church. But there was a more explicit political dimension as well, since the Council
also made it clear that Constantinople was to be regarded as the premier
Christian city of the eastern Empire, to the detriment of the authority of the
patriarchal sees of Antioch and, especially, Alexandria.
What did this all mean? There has been much debate concerning this issue,
particularly over whether the doctrinal rupture between Chalcedonians and
Monophysites in any way undermined the unity and strength of the Christian
empire, and so paved the way for the Muslims’ success in the seventh century.
Assertions that the emergence of a distinctively Monophysite Coptic church “must
be regarded as the outward expression of the growing nationalist trends” in Egypt
seem, at best, anachronistic.42
Doctrinal tensions between Chalcedonians and
Monophysites did not imply an intractable hostility between Greek-speaking,
imperial Chalcedonian Christians on the one hand, and Coptic-speaking, Monophysite
Egyptian Christians on the other. Several historians have persuasively
argued that the cultural overtones and political implications of the theological
division should be minimized: that by the end of late antiquity, there was in fact a
close symbiosis of (and not an atavistic struggle between) Greek and Coptic
cultures in Egypt, and that Monophysite anger at the Chalcedonian creed did not
imply that Egyptian Christians were hostile to the empire itself.43
The religions of late antiquity 23
41
Ibid. On the controversy surrounding the conciliar declaration of Mary as Theotokos, see Hilda
Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 101–11;
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), 55–65.
42
Atiya, History of Eastern Christianity, 69. Atiya’s florid rhetoric sometimes rises to comical
heights, as in his assertion (77) that Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria at the time of the Muslim
conquests, was a “Melkite colonialist” whose “national origin was doubtful” and who was “one of
the most hateful tyrants in Egyptian history. He used the Cross as an iron mace to club native
resistance.”
43
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 100–37, esp. 127; Glen Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 67.
On the other hand, it is surely significant that by the end of the fifth century, the
majority of Christians in Egypt, Syria, and (for different reasons) Iraq adhered to
doctrines which put them at odds with those espoused by the church associated
with imperial authority. Their frustration and anger with the imperial church had a
profound impact on the Christian identity of those who professed a Monophysite
creed. The Melkite patriarch of Alexandria in the wake of Chalcedon, who adhered
to the Council’s Christological declarations, discovered as much when he was
torn apart by a mob of Egyptians in 457. More importantly, the schism resulted
in the emergence in both Egypt and Syria of rival networks of bishops, priests
and churches, one loyal to the Chalcedonian formulations generally supported
(although in varying degrees, and not without efforts to heal the breach) by the
emperors, another to the Monophysite creed. And Monophysite frustrations did not
dissipate quickly. It would be misleading to suggest that local Syrian and Egyptian
Christians systematically betrayed the Christian Roman state to the Arab invaders.
On the other hand, the hostility which sometimes characterized their relations with
Melkite authorities probably helped to sap the vigor of Roman efforts to resist the
Arabs in Syria and Egypt. That, at least, was the suggestion of John, a Coptic
bishop in Upper Egypt in the late seventh century, who identified the anger of the
Coptic inhabitants of some Egyptian towns towards the Roman emperor Heraclius,
“because of the persecution wherewith he had visited all the land of Egypt in
regard to the orthodox faith,” as having contributed to the Arabs’ victory.44
The situation faced by Christians in Iraq and the other provinces of the Sasanian
empire was completely different.45
Christianity first penetrated the area to the east
of Syria through the sizeable Jewish communities of Mesopotamia. By the third
century it was well established and organized, and began to attract the attention of
the Zoroastrian priesthood which was growing closer to the Sasanian state.
Christianity continued to grow down to and even into the Islamic period, at the
expense of Jews, pagans, and Zoroastrians; by the late sixth century, it constituted
probably the single largest confessional community in Iraq. There are parallels
between its organization and relation to the state and those of the Mesopotamian
Jews, parallels which assume a special importance when viewed from the vantage
point of the later Islamic period. The experience of both Jews and Christians in the
Sasanian empire demonstrates that, in this world of diverse faiths, an individual’s
social and even political identity derived primarily from his or her religious
24 The Formation of Islam
44
John of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, trans. R. H. Charles (London: Williams
and Norgate, 1916), 184; cf. Walter Kaegi, “Egypt on the Eve of the Muslim Conquest,” in The
Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1: Islamic Egypt, 640–1517, ed. Carl Petry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34–61, esp. 45–6; and idem, Byzantium and the Early Islamic
Conquests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 265–9.
45
On Christianity in Iraq and in the Sasanian Empire, see J. P. Asmussen, “Christians in Iran,” in The
Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. EhsanYarshater
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 924–48; Sebastian Brock, “Christians in the
Sasanian Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalties,” in Religion and National Identity, ed. Stuart Mews
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) (Studies in Church History, 18), 1–19; Morony, Iraq after the
Muslim Conquest, 332–83; and, more carefully, Atiya, History of Eastern Christianity, 237–66.
community, foreshadowing the situation in the Islamic Middle Ages.46
As with the
Jewish leadership, the church “became an agent of the state to secure the loyalty
of its Christian subjects”: the church led Christians in prayer for the king, and
might even excommunicate Christians who rebelled against the state, in exchange
for which the ecclesiastical hierarchy expected the state’s assistance in enforcing
its will on members of its own community. The Sasanian emperors were not, of
course, Christian. Like their Christian Roman counterparts, however, they might
intervene in church affairs, to convene a council of Christian bishops, for example,
or to secure the election of some particular candidate as catholicos.47
The social and political condition of Christians in the Sasanian empire was
even more complex than that of their co-religionists to the west. Christians shared
with Jews an underlying aversion to a number of Zoroastrian beliefs or practices –
the worship of fire, for example, or consanguinous marriages – and the Zoroastrian
priesthood (itself shocked by Christian ideals such as virginity) periodically
unleashed waves of persecution of Christians. One of the worst outbreaks occurred
during the reign of Shapur II, which produced the horrors recorded in the Syriac
“Lives of the Martyrs.” On the other hand, Christianity was never formally
proscribed by the emperors. Christians served the Sasanians in the army and in the
bureaucracy, sometimes in quite senior positions. Thus Christians found themselves
owing allegiance to both Christ and the shah, and “under normal conditions
there was not any clash of loyalties since membership of the ‘People of God’ and
of the Persian state belonged to separate modes of existence.”48
After the fourth
century, troubles arose primarily during periods of conflict and tension with the
Christian Roman Empire. So, for example, a treaty with the Roman empire in 561
provided that Christians were to be left alone, allowed to worship freely and
construct churches. Under Khusrau Parviz, who regained his throne as a result
of Byzantine intervention and who was married to two Christian women, the
condition of Christians improved further, but then deteriorated sharply during
the cataclysmic war which engulfed the two states in the early seventh century.
The Christological controversies which plagued Roman Christianity also had
an impact in the Sasanian world. The majority of Sasanian Christians followed
what came to be identified as the Nestorian position, one distinct from the
Chalcedonian and hostile to the Monophysite. According to Nestorius, the patriarch
of Constantinople who gave his name to the sect, Christ was the locus of two
entirely independent natures, the divine and the human: so, for example, while
Mary might be considered the mother of Christ, she could in no way be labeled
Theotokos, “God-Bearer.” But Monophysites, linked to the Jacobite church of
Syria, also had a strong and distinct presence in Mesopotamia. The situation was
further confused by the presence of significant communities of Melkite Christians,
many of them the product of deportations carried out by the Sasanians from
The religions of late antiquity 25
46
A point made by both Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire,” and Morony, Iraq after the
Muslim Conquest.
47
Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire,” 4–5; Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 334–41
(the quotation is taken from p. 334).
48
Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire,” 14.
territories conquered from Rome or from border areas during the course of their
periodic wars, although since the state itself was not Christian, no sect could
effectively enforce a claim to representing “orthodoxy.”49
As in Syria and Egypt,
the most important consequence of the theological disputes was the emergence of
separate and distinct ecclesiastical networks and structures, churches, monasteries,
and schools. This fueled sectarian competition, especially between Nestorians and
Monophysites. Significantly, the competition grew sharper in the early years of the
seventh century, just before the Arab invasions, as churches and monasteries
purged their ranks of nonconforming members. Some Iraqi Christians later
concluded that the sectarian strife contributed to the ease with which the Muslims
took the country, or, in more theological language, that God permitted the Arabs to
triumph as a punishment for Christian disunity.50
On the other hand, the competition
also provided a catalyst for vigorous proselytization. Nestorian Christianity
in particular proved to be a dynamic force in the religious history of the early
medieval period, its missionaries active throughout Central Asia and as far as
China at least until the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century.51
But the
Nestorians failed to establish a permanent relationship with a major political entity,
and so in the long run succumbed to the dynamic mix of political and religious
authority represented by Islam.52
Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism
Inhabitants of the Sasanian empire, even more than those of the Roman, lived in a
world of astonishing religious variety in the centuries before the rise of Islam.
Judaism and Christianity, as we have already seen, staked out a significant
presence in the Sasanian realm, largely but not exclusively in its Mesopotamian
provinces. Pagans of various stripes could be found virtually everywhere. Iran’s
geographic location was a critical factor in giving shape to the religious mix. Lying
just beyond the easternmost Roman provinces, it provided a natural refuge for
Jews fleeing Roman persecution; and Jews, in their wake, brought Christianity.
Further east, Iran borders on the culturally and religiously diverse world of India,
and even apart from any prehistoric connections between the Indo-European
settlers of the two regions, commercial and strategic imperatives drew them
together, particularly under the Sasanians, who cultivated mercantile links to the
sub-continent.53
As a result, Buddhism made its presence felt in late antique
Iran, particularly in its easternmost provinces, and through Iran was known to
26 The Formation of Islam
49
On the Melkite church in the Sasanian empire, see J. Nasrallah, “L’Église melchite en Iraq, en Perse
et dans l’Asie centrale,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 25 (1975), 135–73 and 29 (1976), 16–33.
50
A. Mingana, Sources Syriaques, 2 vols. (Mosul: Imprimerie des Pères Dominicaines, 1907),
2:172–4; Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 375–80; Asmussen, “Christians in Iran,” 946–7.
51
Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 162; Atiya, History of Eastern Christianity, 257–66.
52
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 122–3.
53
André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 1.45–64,
esp. 48–53.
Manichaeans and others in the Fertile Crescent.54
When he sought to leave a record
in stone of the religious rivals he had fought and vanquished, the zealous thirdcentury
Zoroastrian priest Karter listed Jews, shamans, Christians, Manichaeans,
and Brahmans.55
But the principal religion within the Sasanian realm, because of its roots in
Iranian culture and history and because of its intimate connection to the Sasanian
state, was Zoroastrianism. Late antique Zoroastrianism, even more than Judaism
and Christianity, is difficult to define in any precise and categorical fashion. A
distinctive Zoroastrian faith was beginning to emerge in late antiquity, but the
process was not complete, even by the time of the Arab invasions. Part of the
problem is textual: it is not easy to assign precise dates to the principal Zoroastrian
texts, and in any case they tend to incorporate much older material. A more fundamental
problem is that Zoroastrian doctrine took shape only slowly, sometimes in
response to the theological assertions of other religious traditions. Separate
polytheistic, monotheistic, and especially dualist strands can be identified within
the broader Zoroastrian tradition. The polytheism of ancient Iranian religion
probably continued as the norm for many of the common people, although the
priests tended to redefine the multitudinous deities as angelic beings subordinate
to the great god Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd). By contrast, another strand within the
Zoroastrian tradition in the Sasanian period subordinated both Ahura Mazda and
the personification of the evil principle, Ahriman, to an impersonal god of infinite
time and space, Zurvan.56
Dualism, however, the understanding of the cosmic
order as the product of a struggle between good and evil deities, was the dominant
theological tendency. Zoroastrian dualism was distinguished from that of
Manichaeism by its insistence upon the genesis of the world, or at least most of it
(minus things like reptiles, snakes, and the seven planets), at the hands of the
good, rather than the evil, deity.
In Iran no less than in the Roman empire, the characteristic process of religious
definition in late antiquity was a product of intense competition and not-alwaysfriendly
dialogue. Monotheistic passages in Zoroastrian texts may have served
as an apologetic response to Jewish and Christian polemic.57
But in Iran,
Manichaeism provided perhaps the most serious threat. Karter’s persecution of
non-Zoroastrians was very likely inspired in part by the favor shown to the new
religion by the king Shapur I (r. ca. 241–273). Shapur was generally tolerant, at
one point issuing an edict that “Magi [i.e., Zoroastrians], Zandiks (Manichaeans),
The religions of late antiquity 27
54
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 82–4; M. Tardieu, “La diffusion du Bouddhisme dans l’empire
Kouchan, l’Iran et la Chine, d’après un kephalaoin manichéen inédit,” Studia Iranica 17 (1988),
153–82.
55
Compare Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire,” 6, with Martin Sprengling, Third Century
Iran: Sapor and Kartir (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1953), 41–2, 51, 58.
56
See Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 286–9; J. Duchesne-Guillemin, “Zoroastrian
Religion,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods,
ed. EhsanYarshataer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 866–908; R. C. Zaehner, The
Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1961), 175–264.
57
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 287.
Jews, Christians and all men of whatever religion should be left undisturbed and
at peace in their belief.”58
The number of Christians especially increased
dramatically during his reign.59
But Manichaeism was tempting to the shah, who
met the prophet Mani, gave him license to preach within his realm, and, according
to some, may have considered adopting Manichaeism as the official religion of the
state. The precise date of the compilation and redaction of the Zoroastrian texts
known collectively as the Avesta has been much discussed, but they may have
taken shape as a direct response of the Zoroastrian priesthood to the challenge
posed by Mani and his revelations.60
The situation in the Sasanian empire differed somewhat from that in the Roman
because Zoroastrianism retained certain traits of a national, i.e., a peculiarly
Iranian, religion. There were some non-Iranian converts to Zoroastrianism, even
among the tribes of the Arab peninsula. In an ethnically mixed area such as Iraq,
however, Zoroastrianism was primarily the religion of the ruling elite, Iranians
belonging to the upper classes and serving the Sasanian state.61
There is little
sign among Zoroastrians of active and general proselytization, as practiced by
Christians, Jews, and Manichaeans, at least among the non-Iranians of the
empire.62
On the other hand, even the Iranian population included a growing
number of converts to Christianity, especially toward the end of the Sasanian
period, a phenomenon which may at times have strained relations between the
state and the Christian churches.
This is not to say that there was no universalist dimension to Zoroastrian
religious life; but what universalism there was derived directly, and to a greater
degree than in the case of Rome and Christianity, from the explicit connection
between religion and the state.63
As we have seen, the commitment of the Sasanian
emperors to Zoroastrianism was not an uncontested given. As late as the mid-fifth
century, Yazdigird II (r. 438–457) made a close study of all the faiths of his
subjects, although in the end he remained faithful to Zoroastrianism. But over
time, the tendency was toward a union of the outlook and interests of the state and
the Zoroastrian hierarchy. The tenth-century Muslim historian Masfiudi quotes
Ardashir, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as saying that “religion and
kingship are two brothers, and neither can dispense with the other. Religion is the
28 The Formation of Islam
58
Cited in Duchesne-Guillemin, “Zoroastrian Religion,” 879.
59
M.-L. Chaumont, “Les sassanides et la christianisation de l’Empire iranien au 3e
siècle,” Revue de
l’histoire des religions 165 (1964), 165–202.
60
H. S. Nyberg, “Sassanid Mazdaism According to Moslem Sources,” Journal of the K. R. Cama
Oriental Institute 39 (1958), 1–63, esp. 17–32; cf. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 81. Others
have credited competition with Islam for encouraging the compilation of definitive Zoroastrian
texts. François Nau, “Étude historique sur la transmission de l’Avesta et sur l’époque probable de
sa dernière redaction,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 95 (1927), 149–99.
61
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 296–7; on converts to Zoroastrianism, see the sources cited
on p. 280.
62
Nyberg, “Sassanid Mazdaism,” 11. One exception was an effort to convert the population of
Armenia, although this probably had principally to do with strategic considerations, Christian
Armenia lying on the border between the Sasanian and Roman empires. Zaehner, Dawn and
Twilight, 187–8.
63
A point made by Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 24–36.
foundation of kingship and kingship protects religion.”64
Khusrau Anushirvan was
remembered by the Zoroastrian priests as having “put into practice the teachings
of the word of the religion and the worship and rites of the gods,” and as having
challenged the enemies of the orthodox faith.65
The close connection between
religious and political authority in late antique Zoroastrianism is important for its
foreshadowing of later developments in Islam. The Sasanian monarch, according
to Zoroastrian precepts developed and articulated during this period, was held to
be supreme in all affairs, both religious and secular. He “served as the divinely
ordained link between man the microcosm and god the macrocosm. Only through
the king did the people have access to religion, god, and salvation.” Apparently the
Zoroastrian priests had to deal with kings whose commitment to the faith was less
than perfect, and so they developed a doctrine by which it became a religious duty
to contradict a heretical ruler and to overthrow those who threatened the “good
religion” with their transgressions. But such errancies aside, Zoroastrian doctrine
affirmed the union of kingship and religion, and so enjoined universal obedience
to the sacralized monarch.66
The importance of the monarch in Zoroastrian thought derived in large part
from his role as the lynchpin of an elaborate and (at least in theory) rigid social
hierarchy, which itself was believed to reflect the structure of the cosmos. The
fundamental distinction within Iranian society was that between nobles, who were
exempted from certain taxes and forbidden to marry outside their caste, and
commoners. The Zoroastrian literature, however, articulated a much more complicated
and baroque social vision, in which humanity was divided among four
social strata, variously defined but commonly consisting of priests, the military,
cultivators, and artisans. This quadripartite model, the creation of which was
ascribed in Zoroastrian legend to the primal and archetypal ruler Jamshid, and
which almost certainly had an ancient connection to similar models prominent in
Indian thought, formed the ideological foundation of the Sasanian state. The
monarch had the responsibility to defend the system and to preserve the integrity
of each caste so that, through a “circle of equity” in which each stratum supported
the work of the others, both cosmos and society could survive and function. On a
practical level, the system obviously served those at the top, in particular the
religious hierarchy, who supervised a complex ecclesiastical structure and vast
endowments; one leading and sympathetic modern student of Zoroastrianism has
referred to late Sasanian society as “priest-ridden.”67
Zoroastrian thought did not, however, lack a profound egalitarian undercurrent,
The religions of late antiquity 29
64
Duchesne-Guillemin, “Zoroastrian Religion,” 877; R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), 85.
65
From the Denkart, as cited by R. C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1955), 53.
66
Jamsheed Choksy, “Sacral Kingship in Sasanian Iran,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 2 (1988), 35–52;
the quotation is taken from p. 37.
67
Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1979), 140–44. See also the excellent summary of socio-religious thought and practice in the
Sasanian period in Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 66–90.
one which perhaps emerged in reaction to the dominant ideology of social
division. This undercurrent, which can be traced back at least to a third-century
Zoroastrian religious teacher named Zaradusht, surfaced periodically in the late
Sasanian period, most notably under the shah Kavad (r. 488–496 and 498–531)
and through a revolt led by a certain Mazdak around the time of the succession
of Khusrau Anushirvan to the throne in 531. The exact connection between
“Kavad’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt,” and between them and Zaradusht’s
teaching, has been the subject of much discussion.68
Zaradusht had apparently
identified the private possession of property and women as the root of social
injustice and disharmony, and so preached a doctrine of communal access to them.
Kavad sought to undermine the purity of lineage, and thus the status and power of
the nobility, by insisting upon universal access to women; while Mazdak led a
peasant revolt which demanded universal access too, or at least the radical
redistribution of, both women and wealth. The efforts of both men failed. Kavad
was deposed by his nobles, and Mazdak’s rebellion was suppressed by Khusrau
around the time of his accession to the throne, for which service to the “good
religion” he was given the title Anushirvan, “Immortal Soul.” It is difficult to be
certain about the details and inter-relationship of the doctrines espoused by
Zaradusht, Kavad, and Mazdak, since information about them is drawn almost
entirely from sources hostile to them. But individually and collectively they
represented a challenge to the dominant Iranian social order and its religious
foundation, a challenge which emerged from within Zoroastrianism itself. More
importantly, from our perspective, the challenge had a lasting legacy on religious
developments in the medieval Near East, since much of the doctrine of Mazdak
reappeared among certain sectarian groups in Iran during the first several centuries
of the Muslim era.69
Mazdak and his creed remind us of the tense but exciting religious atmosphere
which existed under the Sasanian emperors, and the same is true of Manichaeism.
The prophet Mani himself was born into a family attracted to the Jewish-Christian
baptist sects which proliferated in the Fertile Crescent in the first centuries of the
Common Era. After receiving a series of revelations from a celestial being as a
young man, Mani began to preach a new religion – his “hope,” as he called it. His
doctrine bore a superficial resemblance to Christianity – Jesus, for example, plays
a prominent role in the Manichaean myth – but Mani also drew upon certain Indian
ideas (such as metempsychosis) and especially Iranian dualism. The elaborate
mythology developed by Mani in his writings posited a universe produced by the
conflict between two primal forces, light and darkness, truth and falsehood,
expressed sometimes in Christian language as God the Father and the devil, and
sometimes in Zoroastrian terms as Zurvan and Ahriman. Physical existence in this
30 The Formation of Islam
68
Most recently in a stimulating article by Patricia Crone, “Kavd’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt,”
Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 29 (1991), 21–42.
69
On Mazdakism generally, see Crone, “Kavd’s Heresy,” and Ehsan Yarshater, “Mazdakism,” in
The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan
Yarshataer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 991–1024.
mythology is conceived as a state of suffering, as the divine sparks present in
the progeny of Adam await their separation from dark matter. So Manichaeism
developed a gnostic doctrine through which knowledge of the true human condition,
and a consequent avoidance of procreation, paved the path to final
redemption.70
Beyond the baroque and compelling richness of Manichaean doctrine and
mythology, several aspects of Mani’s preaching and its outcome demand our
attention. In the first place, Mani’s religious activities took place in a specifically
Iranian context. He preached before the emperor Shapur on a number of occasions,
dedicated a book to him, and, according to legend, converted the shah’s brother. At
the Sasanian court, he encountered and came into conflict with the Zoroastrian
priest Karter. The two shared the ambition of harnessing the power of the state to
their respective religions. In time, however, it was Karter who prevailed: in 276,
under the emperor Bahram, Mani was arrested at Karter’s urging, and eventually
died in prison.
On the other hand, Mani and his followers aimed from the beginning at an even
larger target. Of all the religions of late antiquity, Manichaeism was the most
explicitly universalist, Islam not excepted. Its universalism is already apparent in
the prophet’s self-conscious syncretism. “Wisdom and deeds have always from
time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God,” proclaimed
Mani. “So in one age they have been brought by the messenger called Buddha
to India, in another by Zaradust [Zoroaster] to Persia, in another by Jesus to the
West. Thereupon this revelation has come down and this prophecy has appeared
in the form of myself, Mani, the envoy of the true God in the Land of Babylon.”
Mani proclaimed his message as the culmination of all previous revelations from
God. “As a river joins another river to form a strong current, so the old books
are added together in my Scriptures; and they have formed a great Wisdom,
such as has not existed in previous generations.” Manichaean missionaries propagated
their doctrines well beyond the borders of the Iranian empire. Its appeal may
be measured by the varied languages in which translations of Manichaean texts
have survived, including Coptic, Turkish, and Chinese. In the Roman Empire, as
is well known, Manichaeism was a potent force, which at one point held a
powerful attraction for St Augustine. The bishop of Hippo later waged a polemical
battle against the faith, as did the third-century pagan philosopher Alexander of
The religions of late antiquity 31
70
For general studies of Mani and Manichaeism, see Geo Widengren, “Manichaeism and Its Iranian
Background,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian
Periods, ed. EhsanYarshater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 965–90; idem, Mani
and Manichaeism (NewYork: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965); Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism
in Mesopotamia and the Roman East (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); idem, Manichaeism in the Later
Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edition (Tubingen: J. C. P. Mohr, 1992). For useful
summaries of Manichaean doctrine, see Widengren, “Manichaeism and Its Iranian Background,”
972–84; Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, second edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 206–37;
Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, in 3 volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 2.384–95.
Lycopolis.71
Its missionaries were active in Central Asia well into the Middle Ages,
and for a time in the late eighth and early ninth centuries Mani’s faith was adopted
as the official religion of the Uighur Turks.
In the end, however, despite its universalism and its appeal, Manichaeism
failed. In part it did so because it never permanently attached itself to any of the
principal empires which dominated the Near East from late antiquity into the
modern period.72
The stringent demands which Manichaeism imposed on its
followers may also have limited its appeal. Manichaean communities were divided
into two groups, the “elect” and the “hearers.” The former lived extremely circumscribed
lives, sheltered from harmful and soul-entrapping activities such as the
eating of meat and, especially, sex and procreation. The “hearers” were not subject
to the rigorous asceticism of the “elect.” On the other hand, they could not look
forward to as perfect or swift a salvation: whereas the elect, according to the
Muslim author Ibn al-Nadim, would be returned at death to the “Gardens of Light”
from whence they originally came, the “hearers” could expect to remain “in the
world like a man who sees horrible things in his dream, plunging into mud and
clay,” until “his light and spirit are rescued, so that he becomes attached, adhering
to the Elect, donning their garments after the long period of his [transitional]
uncertainty.”73
In some ways this put the social aspect of Manichaeism at odds
with the other universalizing religions of late antiquity, especially Islam, in which
the Koranic emphasis on divine mercy provided a path to salvation which even the
most humble could follow. On this level, Manichaeism could not compete, and
unlike Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, eventually became entirely
extinct. On the other hand, its failure was not immediately apparent, even to the
Islamic conquerors of the Near East in the seventh and eighth centuries.
Manichaeism had an appeal even for some early Muslims, as we shall see. And
when early Muslim polemicists defended their radical monotheism in the face of
Iranian dualism, it was the compelling mythology and syncretistic doctrine of
Mani, rather than the Zoroastrianism associated with the Sasanian state, which
occupied most of their attention.74
Paganism
Of the religious traditions of late antiquity, paganism was the oldest. The use
of the term paganism tends to make the historian uncomfortable, for a number
of reasons. In the first place, it is employed to indicate religious beliefs and
32 The Formation of Islam
71
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 46–60; P. W. van
der Horst, An Alexandrian Platonist Against Dualism: Alexander of Lycopolis’ Treatise ‘Critique of
the Doctrines of Manichaeus’ (Leiden: Brill, 1974). On Manichaean universalism, see Brown,
World of Late Antiquity, 164; Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire, 86–120; Fowden,
Empire to Commonwealth, 72–6. The first quotation is found in Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later
Roman Empire, 86, and the second in Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 2:387.
72
This point is made most forcefully by Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 75.
73
Ibn al-Nadim, Fihrist, trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 796.
74
Crone, “Kavd’s Heresy and Mazdak’s Revolt,” 27.
practices of almost unlimited variety, many of them unconnected in any meaningful
sense to others also defined as manifestations of paganism. From one
perspective, there was no such thing as paganism, but there were lots of
paganisms, most of them deeply rooted in local and ethnic communities.
Consequently, as one historian has recently and sensibly put it, “to buy into such
a category is to render oneself immediately imprecise.”75
Secondly, the term’s
polemical overtones can also mislead us. The word “pagan” itself (originally
indicating a rustic villager, or boor) was a term of abuse which Christians used to
denote those who followed religions other than their own, in particular the ancient
cults which lingered on in rural areas after the cities of the Mediterranean region
had become predominantly Christian. The term “paganism” tends to conjure
images of Greeks performing sacrifices to Athena and Apollo, or Egyptians
worshiping multiple deities in various animal forms; and no doubt polytheism, and
the belief in and the worship of various localized deities, remained one aspect of
the pagan experience throughout the period, especially perhaps among the common
people and in rural settings. But paganism – or more accurately, some of the
paganisms of late antiquity – had moved a good distance from the religion of
Homer and Ramses, and in many respects shared a good deal with the Christian
and Islamic traditions which replaced it.
Despite the imprecision of the term, historians fall back on it, inevitably if
reluctantly, to identify the mass of inter-connected religious traditions and cults
which emerged from the ancient world and which found themselves in competition
with the newly self-conscious communities of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and,
later, Muslims. In response to the more precise religious identity of, for example,
Christianity, fourth-century pagans such as Libanius and the Roman emperor
Julian understood themselves to represent an alternative – an older alternative – to
the new religions. The commitment of late antique and early medieval defenders
of paganism reflected not only a nostalgic longing for a vanishing faith, but a
genuine appreciation for a tradition which, in its breadth, sophistication, and
universalist outlook, laid the groundwork for and in many ways anticipated the
achievements and vision of the new monotheisms. “Who was it that settled the
inhabited world and propagated cities, if not the outstanding men and kings of
paganism?” asked the Sabian Thabit ibn Qurra (d. 901). “Who revealed the arcane
sciences? Who was vouchsafed the epiphany of that godhead who gives oracles
and makes known future events, if not the most famous of the pagans? … They
filled the world with upright conduct and with wisdom, which is the chief part of
virtue. Without the gifts of paganism, the earth would have been empty and
impoverished, enveloped in a great shroud of destitution.”76
In global terms, it is impossible to deny, first, that paganism was locked in
a struggle with the emerging monotheistic traditions, and second, that paganism
was, in late antiquity, in a secular decline. The signs of competition are rampant:
The religions of late antiquity 33
75
David Frankfurter, Religion in Greco-Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 33.
76
Cited by Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 64–5.
in the laws by which Christian Roman emperors sought to marginalize or suppress
pagan cults, or in the popular stories of the Christian saints which portray them
contesting with “magicians” and “demons” (behind which one can often detect
pagan holy men or localized pagan deities). And the decline is measurable, and not
merely in the obvious fact that, at some point between the third and seventh
centuries, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Near East formally converted
to one of the new faiths. Egypt provides a case in point. An important marker of
the decline of paganism there lies in the decay of the active life of the temples
and other cultic sites and occasions. Organized paganism in Egypt was in trouble
well before the rapid spread of Christianity in the fourth century, and probably
contributed to the latter phenomenon, rather than being a product of it. The last
attested celebration of the Ameysia, an important festival associated with the
goddess Isis, occurred in 257 CE, well before the majority of Egyptians even
nominally professed Christianity. Even before this, Egyptian temples had begun to
suffer from a decline in the level of financial support from imperial authorities,
support which had for centuries been critical to their construction, upkeep, and
embellishment. In Egypt, the situation was made worse by the fact that the priests
apparently lost their ability to read and write the Egyptian language in its ancient
scripts, and so found themselves partially cut off from their pagan religious
traditions: other than at the remote temple at Philae in Upper Egypt, there are
virtually no hieroglyphic or demotic inscriptions after the mid-third century.77
But the story of the struggle and decline of paganism is incomplete, and can
obscure a much more nuanced story of religious identity and development. If
paganism at some point “died,” in the sense that all the inhabitants of Egypt or
Syria or wherever came to identify themselves at least formally as Jews, or
Christians, or (later) Muslims, the actual death of paganism was a protracted affair
– and again, one which was by no means complete at the rise of Islam. Signs of the
survival of pagan traditions abound throughout the Near East. At Edessa in Syria,
one of the earliest and most important centers of eastern Christianity, a city which
the pagan emperor Julian had shunned for its commitment to the Christian faith,
pagan rituals and sacrifices were still practiced in the late sixth century.78
In Iraq,
organized pagan cults suffered from the hostility of and active persecution by both
Christian bishops and monks and zealous Zoroastrian priests; but the pagans’
enemies were still at it when the Muslim Arabs appeared on the scene in the fourth
and fifth decades of the seventh century. A Nestorian catholicos, shortly after the
Muslim conquest (but well before significant numbers of local residents had
converted to Islam), complained that there were more pagans than Christians in the
34 The Formation of Islam
77
Roger S. Bagnall, “Combat ou vide: christianisme et paganisme dans l’Égypte romaine tardive,”
Ktema 13 (1988 [1992]), 285–96; idem, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 251, 261–73.
78
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 36; J. B. Segal, Edessa “The Blessed City” (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970), 108; Han J. W. Drijvers, “The Persistence of Pagan Cults and Practices in
Christian Syria,” in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, ed. Nina
Garsoian, Thomas Mathews, and Robert Thompson (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982),
35–43.
district of Beth Aramaye (lower Iraq). Reports of human sacrifices in Iraq should
perhaps be approached with some caution, but it is striking that they continue well
into the eighth century.79
In Egypt, too, paganism survived the decline of its
temples. There was active resistance to Christianity both among the philosophers
in Alexandria, and in the countryside. One historian has described a veritable
religious war which traumatized large portions of Upper Egypt in the fifth century,
where entire villages remained untouched by Christianity. As late as the early
seventh century, bishops could find pagan temples to destroy, and idolaters to
baptize.80
Even in the heartlands of the Byzantine Empire, in northwestern Asia
Minor not far from the capital at Constantinople, a Christian missionary in the
mid-sixth century claimed to have converted thousands of pagans, and to have
destroyed or rededicated their temples. Here as elsewhere, those formally converted
to Christianity may have, more or less secretly, preserved their ancient
temples and altars, which they might then frequent at night, and there under the
cover of darkness replay their pre-Christian rites. According to the Byzantine
chronicler Theophanes, when Arab armies besieged the town of Pergamon in 717,
its inhabitants in desperation resorted to a magician and his rather startling formula
for salvation. At his urging, they “produced a pregnant woman who was about to
give birth and cut her up. And after removing her infant and cooking it in a pot, all
those who were intending to fight dipped the sleeves of their right arm in this
detestable sacrifice.” To no avail, recorded the disgusted chronicler; “they were
delivered to the enemy.” The story may or may not be true, but it is significant that
the chronicler could relate it as if it were.81
It was not simply a question of paganism surviving in isolated manifestations,
as a kind of relic. In the first place, the question of paganism is a reminder that
religion and religious identities can be experienced on a variety of levels. The
religious identity of a pagan in, say, an Egyptian village may have been related to,
and informed by, the dominant myths which have survived in ancient Egyptian
literature and the cults of the temples whose finances were increasingly in disarray.
But it was also a product of very practical and immediate needs (such as healing,
or ensuring a decent crop), and so was served not simply by relatively remote
temple priests but by local holy men, local deities, local shrines, local stories, and
religious practices defined or administered by local figures – loci of religious
The religions of late antiquity 35
79
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 384–400.
80
Roger Rémondon, “L’Égypte et la suprème résistance au christianisme (Ve-VIIe siècles),” Bulletin
de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale 51 (1952), 63–78; see also László Kákosy, “Survival
of Ancient Egyptian Gods in Coptic and Islamic Egypt,” Coptic Studies: Acts of the Third
International Congress of Coptic Studies, Warsaw, 20–25 August, 1984, ed. Wlodzmierz Godlewski
(Warsaw: Éditions Scientifiques de Pologne, 1990), 175–7; and idem, “Das Ende des Heidentums
in Ägypten,” Graeco-Coptica: Griechen und Kopten im byzantinischen Ägypten, ed. Peter Nagel
(Halle: Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg Wissenschaftliche Beiträge, 1984), 61–76.
81
The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813, trans.
Cyril Mango and Roger Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 541; on the situation in western
Anatolia more generally, see Frank R. Trombley, “Paganism in the Greek World at the End of
Antiquity: The Case of Rural Anatolia and Greece”, Harvard Theological Review 78 (1985),
327–52.
authority which could survive the unraveling of the more formal networks
associated with temples.82
Secondly, pagan practices, values, and expectations insinuated themselves in a
variety of ways into the spiritual life and frame of reference of the new religious
era. In Egypt, for example, thaumaturgy and oracular functions had always played
an important role in local manifestations of paganism. Those traditions and the
expectations they encouraged may have shaped the particular form of Coptic
Christianity: in Coptic literature, the saints often play the role of healer, seer,
or wielder of supernatural powers. A story from the early fifth-century Lausiac
History by Palladius about a holy man named Makarios is suggestive, in part
because it is so typical of accounts in late antique sources. An Egyptian approached
a (presumably pagan) sorcerer to enlist his aid in attracting the attention
of a woman with whom he was infatuated, or barring that, prevailing upon her
husband to throw her out. Through his magical charms, the sorcerer caused the
woman to assume the shape of a horse. Her husband, naturally distraught, sought
the assistance of the Christian saint. Makarios first expressed a certain impatience
with the situation, complaining to the husband that “you are the horses, for you
have the eyes of horses. Now she is a woman, not at all changed, except in the eyes
of self-deceived men.” At the same time, however, Makarios took very practical
counter-steps: he “blessed water, poured it on her bare skin from the head
downward, and made her appear as a woman,” and, by way of prophylaxis,
enjoined the woman to attend communion regularly.83
As Palladius’ story suggests, in the popular mind the competition between
Christianity and paganism was largely one of power. But at the deep foundational
level of mental structures which manifest themselves as folk belief, change
naturally worked more slowly. At this level, pagans shared with Christians, Jews,
and others certain assumptions, beliefs about the unseen world, and practices
related to those beliefs, which we would recognize as (more or less) “religious”:
a belief in demons, for example, or in the ability of certain spiritually gifted
individuals to confront and control them. In Mesopotamia in the early seventh
century, the sister-in-law of a Christian deacon sought the assistance of pagan
sorcerers to attract his attention. At their direction, she covered herself with oil,
causing “the fire of love for her [to] spread in him like the fire of a blazing
furnace,” which passion was extinguished only through the deacon’s anointing
with a countervailing oil at the hands of a holy man.84
The “sphere of magic” did
not appear, to the men and women of late antiquity, to be clearly distinct from the
36 The Formation of Islam
82
This is the compelling argument of Frankfurter, Religion in Greco-Roman Egypt.
83
Palladius, The Lausiac History, trans. Robert T. Meyer (NewYork: Newman Press, 1964), 56–7; cf.
Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity, 273–5; Frankfurter, Religion in Greco-Roman Egypt, passim, esp.
184–95; Françoise Dunand, “Miracles et guérisons en Égypte tardive,” in Mélanges Étienne
Bernand, ed. Nicole Fick and Jean-Claude Carrière (Besançon: Université de Besançon, 1991),
235–50, on the functional similarity of medical cures produced by pagan gods and Christian holy
men, despite certain differences in the structures through which the faithful begged a cure.
84
Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, 389; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Histories of Rabban Hôrmîzd
the Persian and Rabban Bar-fiIdtâ, 2 vols. (London: Luzac and Co., 1902), 2:266–7.
“sphere of religion,” even if Jewish rabbis and Christian priests did sometimes
view magicians and their trade with distrust and horror.85
And religious authorities
were right, in a sense, to be concerned: the magic common among Christians,
Jews and others owed much to the pagan religions of the ancient world, for their
gods and goddesses often survived as the demons or spirits whose activities the
magicians sought to counter or control. For example, a number of Jewish incantation
bowls from Mesopotamia have survived which sought to counter-act the
evil influence of demons identified as, among others, Ishtar – the name of the
prominent ancient goddess of the region.86
And the astrological preoccupation
of ancient Mesopotamian religion of course had an extended afterlife among
medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
Despite the rise in the level of rhetorical hostility and its accompanying
violence, and despite a corresponding emphasis on formal professions of faith –
developments which left a profound mark on the world Islam inherited – a
dialogue between the religious traditions persisted through the end of late
antiquity. Paganism participated fully in that dialogue, and through it contributed
in substantial and subtle ways to the religious life of those who came later. The
flexibility and syncretistic potential of Mediterranean paganism are well known,
and need no comment here. But other religions, such as Christianity, were also
more porous than bishops and others might insist. In some instances, paganism
found its channel to the future in the form of Hellenism. Much recent scholarship
has tended to minimize the gap in the late antique Near East separating Hellenized
cities from the non-Greek (Syriac, for instance, or Coptic) countryside, and has
stressed the extent to which Hellenism penetrated all layers of society and
provided a common cultural vernacular.87
The connection between paganism and
Hellenism is reflected in the fact that hellenismos can mean, in late antique texts,
“paganism” itself – a point of which the pagan emperor Julian delighted in
reminding Greek-speaking Christians.88
And so the religious differences between,
say, paganism and Christianity were muted by certain astonishing resemblances.
Christians had a trinity, but so too did some pagans, such as those in the Hawran
in Syria who worshiped a trio of gods, one of which was known by a name which
meant “God-man.”89
Holiness, a numinous quality distinguishing certain individuals
from the ordinary run of humankind, was a characteristic of Christian
The religions of late antiquity 37
85
For an excellent discussion of the intersection of Judaism and magic in late antiquity, see Judah
Goldin, “The Magic of Magic and Superstition,” in Aspects of Religious Propaganda in Judaism
and Early Christianity, ed. Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1976), 115–47.
86
Neusner, History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5:215–43, esp. 231; Morony, Iraq after the Muslim
Conquest, 384, 387.
87
On this point, see especially Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, and Cameron, “The Eastern
Provinces in the Seventh Century A.D.” Bowersock, for example, says that Hellenism was “a means
for a more articulate and a more universally comprehensible expression of local traditions” (9).
88
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 9–11.
89
G. W. Bowersock, “An Arabian Trinity,” Harvard Theological Review 79 (1986), 17–21; idem,
Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 17–19. “The significance of a god-man deity in an indigenous cult of
Semitic paganism,” observes Bowersock, “scarcely needs underscoring.”
saints, but also of some late antique philosophers, at least as they were remembered
by their disciples.90
Influence flowed in both directions. An epic fifthcentury
Egyptian poem about Dionysos recounts that “Bacchus our lord shed tears,
so that he might bring an end to the tears of mortals,” a line which “could never
have been written in a Greek pagan poem before the Christian era.”91
On the other
hand, Christian tomb frescoes with scenes drawn from Greek mythology, or an
encomium to the very Christian emperor Theodosius II comparing him to Achilles,
Agamemnon, and Odysseus, bespeak Christian artists, authors, and audiences
thoroughly comfortable with the cultural legacy of the pagan past.92
The precise
direction of the influence is not necessarily important; what is important is that
the extended religious conversation of late antiquity engaged a variety of religious
traditions, and that for all that it came under siege, paganism had not yet spoken
its final word.
38 The Formation of Islam
90
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 15–17; Garth Fowden, “The Pagan Holy Man in Late
Antique Society,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982), 33–59.
91
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 44. The poem is the Dionysiaca of Nonnos of Panopolis,
trans. W. H. D. Pouse, in 3 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1940) (Loeb
Classical Library), 12.171.
92
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 64–5.