UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

The Formation of Islam by Jonathan P. Berkey Summary of the chapters 10 and 17

Antonio Sergio Ackel Barbosa

2016

Chapter 10 - The non-Muslims of early Islam

- Dhimmi were non-Muslims monotheist communities who lived under a pact of protection (dhimma) with the Muslim state.

- For Hitti (1970), dhimmi or Ahl al-dhimmah (people of the covenant or obligation), is a term first applied only to Ahl al-Kitab, i.e. the Jews, Christians and Sabians and later interpreted to include Zoroastrians and others. The term dhimmi, is understood as subject peoples that would enjoy the protection of the Muslims and have no military duty to perform, since they were barred by religion from service in the Muslim army; but they would have a heavy tribute to pay.

- According to Armstrong (2002), The Muslims assumed that Islam was a religion for the descendants of Ismail, as Judaism was the faith of the sons of Isaac. Arab tribesmen had always extended protection to weaker clients (mawali). Once the Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in their new empire had become dhimmis (protected subjects), they could not be raided or attacked in any way. It had always been a point of honour among Arabs to treat their clients well, to come to their aid, or to avenge an injury done to them.

- The trend of most recent research has been to understand the emergence of Islam in the larger context of Near Eastern religious history, and thus to stress continuity between the pre- and post-conquest periods, while at the same time acknowledging the complexity of that continuity: non-Muslim groups both were shaped by and themselves had an impact upon the emerging religion of Islam. This should be seen as a corrective to a perspective which, intentionally or not, facilely presumed from the first a sharp distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim. A number of factors conspired to produce that mistaken, or at least incomplete perspective.

- In his book The History of Arabs, Hitti (1970) points the term jahiliyah which usually rendered “time of ignorance" or "barbarism", in reality means the period in which Arabia had no dispensation, no inspired prophet, no revealed book; for ignorance and barbarism can hardly be applied to such a cultured and lettered society as that developed by the South Arabians. The term Arabians includes in its broad sense all the inhabitants of the peninsula. In its narrow sense it implies the North Arabians, who did not figure in international affairs until the unfolding of the Islamic power. Likewise the term Arabic signifies the Himyarite-Sabaean as well as the northern dialect of al-Hijaz, but since the latter became the sacred language of Islam and utterly superseded the southern dialects of al-Yaman it became the Arabic par excellence. Therefore, when we speak after this of the Arabians and of Arabic we have particularly in mind the North Arabian people and the language of the Koran.

- Hodgson (1974) says that after the founding of the faith, Muslims succeeded in building a new form of society, which in time carried with it its own distinctive institutions, its art and literature, its science and scholarship, its political and social forms, as well as its cult and creed, all bearing an unmistakable Islamic im- press. In the course of centuries, this new society spread over widely diverse climes, throughout most of the Old World. It came closer than any had ever come to uniting all mankind under its ideals. the presence of the Islamic ideals (whatever their cause) has made the crucial difference between the existence of a society that can be called Islamic, on the one hand, and what might presumably as readily have been the perpetuation of earlier traditions in new forms, experiencing no doubt much of what came to pass under the sign of Islam but without the peculiar genius which sets off the civilisation of Islam' as an object of our interest, our admiration, or our fear.

- One the best known documents outlining the terms by which non-Muslims would relate to the Muslim polity is cast in the form of a negotiated settlement between the second caliph and the Christians of Syria, and is persistently known as the “Pact of cUmar,”

- Hitti (1970) gives some details of this pact: The fame of cUmar II does not rest solely on his piety or on his remission of taxes imposed on neophyte Moslems. cUmar was the first caliph and the only Umayyad to impose humiliating restrictions on Christian subjects-measures wrongly ascribed to his earlier namesake and maternal great-grandfather, cUmar I. This so-called "covenant of cUmar", is recorded in several forms, mostly in later sources; and the provisions presuppose closer intercourse between Moslems and Christians than was possible in the early days of the conquest. The most striking regulations issued by this Umayyad caliph were the excluding of Christians from public offices, prohibiting their wearing turbans, requiring them to cut their forelocks, to don distinctive clothes with girdles of leather, to ride without saddles or only on pack saddles, to erect no places of worship and not to lift their voices in time of prayer. The Jews were evidently also included under some of these restrictions and excluded from governmental positions.

- John of Damascus insisted upon portraying Islam as, in part, an outgrowth of a Christian heresy, Arianism. By the time he wrote, however, in the middle of the eighth century, there was good reason to think of Islam as an independent tradition.

- Hodgson (1974) supports Berkey’s above paragraph: the discussion of Muslims' positions (including an alleged early Islamic dogma of predestination) ascribed to John of Damascus in the Marwâni time is clearly apocryphal yet since such problems were mooted among Christians, and since Muslims and Christians did argue, it seems likely that such arguments formed a theological stimulus; but they would surely have arisen independently anyway.

- There was considerable exchange of texts and ideas between Judaism and Islam in the first Islamic century the non-Muslim communities. In fact, quite a few of the first Muslims, including several of those most responsible for shaping the early religious life of the community, had fertile contact with Jews and Jewish traditions.

- Some intercourses between Islam and non-Muslims that Hitti (1970) points are: (i) The Hebrews, before any other people, revealed to the world the clear idea of one God, and their monotheism became the origin of Christian and Moslem belief, (ii) The Jews were geographically next-door neighbours of the Arabians and racially their nearest of kin. (iii) Lands of oasis and some products of the Arabian oases such fruit trees from the north were cultivated and introduced by Nabateans and Jews. (iv) The monotheism affecting Arabia was not entirely of the Christian type. Jewish colonies flourished in al-Madinah and Jews various oases of northern al-Hijaz. (v) There is no evidence of any practice of fasting in pre-Islamic pagan Arabia, but the institution was, of course, well established among both Christians and Jews. (vi) members of tolerated sects, Dhimmis professors of revealed religions, the so-called akl al-dhimmak, i.e. the Christians, Jews and Sabians with whom the Moslems had made covenant.

- For Christians, more than for Jews, the Arab conquests were likely to have meant a traumatic rupture with the communal and political patterns which had developed over the previous centuries. There were intact communities of pagans which survived the Islamic conquests, in some cases for several centuries. The most famous example is that of the socalled “Sabians” of Harran, a town in northern Mesopotamia which the Church Fathers

already knew as Hellenopolis, “the pagan city,” because of the tenacity of its religious traditions.

- The following verse is typical of the Qucran’s acceptance of Jews and Christians (among others): “Surely, those who have believed, and the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, whoever believes in God and the last day and does good deeds need have no fear nor shall they grieve” (5:71). (SONN, 2010)

- Nöldelke (2013) says that Muhammad’s concept of God resembles that of the South Arabian monotheists, whose own designation is preserved in the “Sabians” of the Koran. His concept of the Other World—Paradise, Hell—is neither Jewish nor Christian, but rather continues the South Arabian idea of the “thither world”.

- Zoroastrianism presented a peculiar challenge to the new Muslims. It did not share a prophetic past with Islam, as did Judaism and Christianity, but maybe it could be considered a monotheistic faith, despite the apparent dualism at its core, and one which possessed a revealed scripture.

- Hodgson (1974) states that in Iran, Zarathustra (Zoroaster) spoke to human beings in the name of a supreme and unique God, not reducible within any image, visible or mental, but expressing a moral dimension in the cosmos; he demanded unconditional allegiance from each person to this transcendent vision. Zarathustra and his successors preached the duty of each individual personally to take part in a cosmic struggle between good and evil, justice and injustice, light and dark; a struggle in which finally light and truth must be victorious.

CHAPTER 17 - The non-Muslim communities

- From the perspective of the non-Muslim communities of the Near East, the three centuries which followed the cAbbasid revolution were decisive in two respects. In the first place, it was in this period that the non-Muslims were reduced to minority status in most areas. In the second, with the fuller articulation of Islamic law, the conventions and procedures which would govern relations between the non- Muslim communities and the Islamic state, and which would institutionalise the political and social inferiority of the former, took on a normative shape. On the level of common religious experience, there was also considerable exchange.

- The Abbasids were aware of the strength of the religious movement and, once they had established their dynasty, they had tried to give their regime Islamic legitimacy. They there- fore encouraged the development of figh (Arabic literature) to regulate the life of the population. Under the Umayyads, each town had developed its own figh, but the Abbasids pressed the jurists to evolve a more unified system of law. The nature of Muslim life had changed drastically since the time of the Quran. Since conversion to Islam had been encouraged, the dhimmis were becoming a minority. (ARMSTRONG, 2002)

- Arguably the most pressing problem for the dhimmi communities was that of conversion.

- According to Hitti (1970), Being outside the pale of Muslim law they were allowed the jurisdiction of their own canon laws as administered by the respective heads of their religious communities. When a subject was converted to Islam he was freed, according to this primitive system ascribed by tradition to cUmar, from all tributary obligations, including what was later termed poll tax.

- The Near East was very much the demographic center of world Jewry in this period. Jews of course converted to Islam, as did the followers of other faith traditions, but the pronounced ethnic character of Judaism may have contributed to the cohesion of the community and, possibly, strengthened resistance to the lure of Islam.

- For Hodgson (1974), although there were cases like the Jewish clan Banu Qurayzah in Medina that still resisted Islam and Muhammad's leadership, of the numerous sects of Gnostic type that had arisen especially in Jewish contexts, at least some seem to have been relatively populistic in temper, expressing clear social protest, but not rebellious.

- In the common view, the Christian communities of the Islamic world began to experience an irreversible and ultimately paralyzing decline in the early medieval period.

- Delcambre (2005) tells that in 640 AD, Omar Ibn al-Khattâb, the second Caliph, expelled the Jews and the Christians from Arabia, thereby fulfilling the desire expressed by the Prophet: “Two religions should not co-exist in Arabia.” A century after the death of the Prophet of Islam, Muslim legal experts determined the fate of the Jews and the Christians of conquered countries by relying on the revelations of the Qurcan, but also on the conduct of Muhammad at Medina.

- According to Hodgson (1974), the people of the Bible, having wilfully rejected Muhammad and the Qurcan, and having generation after generation persisted in their contumacy, were not merely ignorant but guilty in their refusal of Islam.

- Manichaeism was more problematic for the Muslim authorities. In this, once again, Islam continued patterns of religious experience and interaction which had characterised the pre-Islamic Near East, since both the Roman and Sasanian empires had sought to suppress the sect.

- According to Hitti (1970), the Manichaeans, at first mistaken by the Moslems for Christians or Zoroastrians, obtained later the status of a tolerated community. The Persian Mani (A.D. 273 or 274) and his teaching seem to have held a special fascination for the followers of Muhammad, for we see that both al-Mahdi and al-Hadi issued strict measures against the tendency in that direction. Even the last Umayyad caliph, whose tutor was put to death as a zindiq (any Moslem whose religious ideas partook of the dogmatic conceptions of the Persians in general and the Manichaeans in particular), was suspected of Manichaeism.

- The history of the Islamisation of Iran is further clouded by a series of syncretistic religious movements, which fused Islamic and older Iranian elements in ways which disturb the neat polarity which sets Islam against Zoroastrianism. The very possibility of a trial for apostasy or heresy presumes a sufficiently well defined sense of religious identity.

- Originally confined to the ahl al-kitab (Scripturaries) of the Koran who came under the rule of Islam, the tolerated status was later extended by the Moslems to include the fire-worshipping Zoroastrians (Majus), the heathen of Harran and the pagan Berbers. The Zoroastrians, mentioned only once in the Koran (22: I 7), could not have been included among the Scripturaries in Muhammad's mind. But in the hadith and by Moslem legists they are treated as such; the term “Sabians” was interpreted to cover them. Practical politics and expediency, as we learned before, made it necessary that the dhimmi status be accorded such a large body of population as that which occupied Iran. (HODGSON, 1974)

- The primary religious development of the era which began with the cAbbasid revolution.

- Hodgson (1974) says that under the cAbbasid caliphs, the barriers gradually fell away that had kept the evolution of the cultural life of the several conquered nations separated from each other and from the internal development of the Muslim ruling class. The leading social strata of the empire, of whatever background-even that minority that was not yet becoming Muslim-lived in a single vast society. Their common cultural patterns formed what can be called High Caliphate civilisation. The cAbbasids took the power away from the Syrian Arabs and distributed it more widely; though they favoured the Khurasanis, they placed their capital in the Iraq (building for that purpose the city of Baghdad), and made it clear that no region, unless perhaps Syria itself, was to be discriminated against. At the same time, they made no effective distinction between the old Arab families and the new Muslims, the Mawali, who had come up from the conquered population (and many of whom no longer even had any affiliation with an Arab tribe). In this way they satisfied some of the most pressing demands of the opposition. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES ARMSTRONG, K. (2002) Islam - A Short History, Modern Library: New York DELCAMBRE, A. (2005) Inside Islam, Marquette University Press: Wisconsin HITTI, P. (1970) The History of Arabs - From the Earliest Times to the Present, Macmillan Education UK: London HODGSON, M. (1974) The Venture of Islam, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago NÖLDEKE, T. (2013) The History of Qurcan, Brill: Boston SONN, T (2010) Islam - A Brief History, Wiley-Blackwell: Sussex