One of my contentions in the past two chapters has been that the change in conversion between Christianity and Islam for the Christian carpenter or farmer or butcher was perhaps not that radical at all, especially if we keep in mind that in its earliest period, Islam, at least among the large mass of its adherents, may have been ideologically rather thin, particularly when compared to its later forms. Indeed, assuming widespread lack of knowledge of Islam among Arab conquerors may help explain why, for example, Syriac writers tend not to invoke Islam in describing the Arab conquests: ‘it would be generally true,’ Brock observed, ‘to say that the Syriac sources of this period see the conquests primarily as Arab, and not Muslim.’
It was precisely because such a religious change was not so radical that it was easy and that conversion became increasingly common. Viewed from a (later) doctrinal perspective, a conversion to Islam may have represented quite a drastic step. One denied such central Christian beliefs as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and one embraced a new prophet and a new scripture. If, however, we accept a model where being Muslim did not necessarily entail a large number of strong theological commitments and at the same time we jettison a view of what it meant to be a Christian in this period which privileges doctrinal propositions and instead see Christianity as a commitment to certain shared symbols and rituals, the broad chasm people were crossing in their journey from Islam to Christianity begins to seem more like a slender crack in the earth.
And it is now we can begin to see some of the payoff for jettisoning a model of early Christian-Muslim interaction which focuses on the differences in doctrines between the two religions and which pays an inordinate amount of attention to Christian-Muslim dispute texts. Such a focus is fundamentally misleading because it is first and foremost elitist. As I have attempted to point out, focusing on points of theological difference between Christians and Muslims takes as representative of Christian and Muslim viewpoints and theology the people whose views were probably the least representative of what the overwhelming majority of Christians and Muslims actually believed—intellectual and theological elites, persons who were often sectarian and spiritual entrepreneurs engaged in attempts at community formation, boundary maintenance and ‘sheep stealing’ from other confessions. In contrast to this, however, in previous chapters, I sought to show that the focus of most ordinary believers was on things like health, safety and sheer survival and suggested that a more fruitful and productive way of thinking about Christianity in the seventh and eighth centuries was as a commitment to and belief in the power of certain symbols and rituals to help cope with the immediate and pressing struggles of everyday life.
If to be a Christian in this period meant to have a commitment to and belief in the power of certain things such as the Cross, the Eucharist, Baptism, the figure of Jesus—without necessarily being able to articulate the precise theological plumbing associated with each of them—then in certain respects an Islam that was itself doctrinally lite, as I have attempted to suggest, among the mass of its early adherents and still very much in the process of development, dispute and debate among the much smaller number of its own theological and spiritual entrepreneurs, was poised in a very advantageous position ideologically to win over large numbers of Christians to its new faith. If, for a Christian, becoming a Muslim meant only abjuration of certain rarefied doctrines which were only partially understood, or not understood at all and therefore incompletely believed (if at all) and playing no part in one’s life, and at the same time conversion held out the possibility of maintaining an adherence to many familiar and cherished Christian symbols and rituals while escaping certain economic burdens, then the change that becoming a Muslim represented was as potentially attractive as it was small—which is to say, very.
We have no reason to believe that in the earliest centuries of Islamic history, when the script of Islamic orthodoxy was still being hammered out the situation would have been any less hybrid and mixed-up than it was in the later periods which scholars like Hasluck, Peponakis, and Vyronis studied; in fact, because what would become the central institutions, rites, texts and habits of later Islamic orthodoxies either did not yet exist or were in their very earliest stages of development, we should assume that the level of hybridity in this early period was even greater, especially if the large majority of Muslims had become Muslim through group conversion and possessed little profound acquaintance with the content, such as it was, of their new religion. For all our labels—Miaphyiste, Chalcedonian, Nestorian, Muslim, pagan, etc.—all the people we are dealing with in the seventh century shared one fundamental and inescapable fact in common: they were human beings and as such, had similar worries and anxieties about health, safety, their families, death and the afterlife as others did. Such concerns were ecumenical and interfaith in the broadest sense and many showed pronounced willingness to be equally interfaith and ecumenical when it came to dealing with these anxieties. Part of the growth and development of Christianity entailed a working out of a repertoire of tools for addressing and dealing with such issues of pressing concern and many Muslims seemed to have no great qualms in availing themselves of such resources and Christian converts to Islam seemed to see no great contradiction or tension in continuing to draw upon them once they had crossed over into a different religion; this is the dynamic underlying the sorts of hybridity of religious practice that we see in the Ottoman period. We have no reason to believe that it was a phenomenon which began only at that relatively late date, either.
Indeed, if we go over our sources from the seventh and eighth centuries we will find traces and hints of precisely the same sort of Muslim continuation of and veneration for Christian symbols and rituals going on which is so abundantly documented for later periods. The Arabs, Isho‘yahb III would write in the middle of the seventh century, ‘are not only not opposed to Christianity, they also sing the praises of our Faith and honor priests and the saints of Our Lord and aid churches and monasteries.’ At the end of the same century, John of Phenek would attribute the coming of Arab rule to God’s care for Christians. ‘We should not think of the advent (of the children of Hagar) as something ordinary,’ he wrote, 'but as due to divine working. Before calling them (God) had prepared them beforehand to hold Christians in honour; thus they also had a special commandment from God concerning our monastic station, that they should hold it in honour.'
To take stock for a moment, we have seen that Muslims showed a reverence for Christian holy men and sought them out for blessings, conversation, meal- companionship and healings. Moreover, they tried to obtain the blessings of Christian saints and the ḥanānā from these holy men. Muslims were interested in Christian churches, prayed there, attended Christian services there and turned some of them into mosques. Muslims—quite possibly former Christian converts—still seemed to regard Christian leaders as authority figures and would obey their orders and even apparently attend church. Such was the relationship of Muslim rulers to churches that some Christians even initially thought that the ‘Abd al-Malik was building the Dome of the Rock as a Christian structure. Muslims showed a belief in the power of the Eucharist, going so far as to steal consecrated hosts from the Byzantine Empire and transport them back into Arab-controlled territory. Muslim men wanted their wives to be able to take communion, even to the point of using threats of force to make sure they were permitted. Muslims were also having their children educated by Christian priests.
Unfortunately, we will never have the sort of rich documentation about religious life and attitudes in the early medieval period that scholars of the Ottoman era or even high Middle Ages possess. Nevertheless, we do have hints and clues that many of the same phenomena of religious hybridity that we have abundant documentation for in those later periods were also occurring in the earliest ‘Islamic’ period as well. If, rather than thinking of Christianity in heavily doctrinal terms, we think of it in terms of an adherence to particular symbols and rituals and belief in the power of certain individuals, it becomes quickly clear that attitudes, at least among some parts of the Muslim population, towards Christian holy men, churches, the Eucharist, Baptism, Jesus and perhaps even the cross, in the early centuries of Islam were such that one could join the new Islamic religious community and yet give up little of what one had previously been committed to on a religious level. This is especially true since, as I have tried to suggest, the level of religious knowledge among the mass of Muslims, most of whom became Muslim through group conversions, was not very high, nor had the institutions and texts which eventually became sources of normativity in Islam crystallized, or in some cases, even been born.
Topic: what we really know about early Islamic History ?