3/4/2020 How did the Christian Middle East become predominantly Muslim?

| University of Oxford
How did the Christian Middle East become
predominantly Muslim?
OXFORD ARTS BLOG (//WWW.OX.AC.UK/NEWS/ARTS-BLOG)
17 Sep 2018How did the ancient Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to the
majority-Muslim world we know today, and what role did violence play in this
process? These questions lie at the heart of Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence
and the Making of the Muslim World (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13216.html) (Princeton University
Press), a new book by associate professor of Islamic history Christian C. Sahner. In a guest post
for Arts Blog (//www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog) , Professor Sahner, from Oxford's Faculty of Oriental
Studies (https://www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) , explores his ndings. 

Although Arab armies quickly established an Islamic empire during the seventh and eighth
centuries, it took far longer for an Islamic society to emerge within its frontiers. Indeed,
despite widespread images of “conversion by the sword” in popular culture, the process of
Islamisation in the early period was slow, complex, and often non-violent. Forced
conversion was fairly uncommon, and religious change was driven far more by factors such
as intermarriage, economic self-interest, and political allegiance. Non-Muslims were
generally entitled to continue practising their faiths, provided they abided by the laws of
their rulers and paid special taxes. Muslim elites sometimes even discouraged conversion,
for when non-Muslims embraced Islam, they no longer had to provide these taxes to the
state, and thus the state’s scal base threatened to contract. Compounding this was a belief
among some that Islam was a special dispensation only for the Arab people. Thus, when
non-Arabs converted, they were sometimes treated as second-class citizens, despised as
little better than Christians, Jews, or other “in dels”.

This combination of factors meant that the Middle East became predominantly Muslim far
later than an older generation of scholars once assumed. Although we lack reliable
demographic data from the pre-modern period with which we could make precise
estimates (such as censuses or tax registers), historians surmise that Syria-Palestine
crossed the threshold of a Muslim demographic majority in the 12th century, while Egypt
may have passed this benchmark even later, possibly in the 14th. What we mean by the
“Islamic world” thus takes on new meaning: Muslims were the undisputed rulers of the
Middle East from the seventh century onward, but they presided over a mixed society in
which they were often dramatically outnumbered by non-Muslims.

It is against this backdrop that the phenomenon of Christian martyrdom took place. We
know about these martyrs thanks to a large but understudied corpus of hagiographical
texts written in a variety of medieval languages, including Greek, Arabic, Latin, Syriac,
Armenian, and Georgian. Set in places as varied as Córdoba, the Nile Delta, Jerusalem, and
the South Caucasus, they tell the lives of Christians who ran afoul of the Muslim
authorities, were executed, and were later revered as saints. The martyrs were participants
in this broader culture of conversion, but as their deaths make clear, they were also
dissenters from this culture, individuals who protested Islamisation and attempted to
reverse the tide of religious change.

The rst and largest group consisted of Christians who converted to Islam but reneged and
returned to Christianity. Because apostasy came to be considered a capital offence under
Islamic law, they faced execution if found guilty. The second group was made up of Muslim
converts to Christianity who had no prior experience of their new religion. The third
consisted of Christians who were executed for blasphemy; that is, publicly reviling the
Prophet Muhammad, usually before a high-ranking Muslim of cial. The martyrs were small
in number – not more than around 270 discrete individuals between Spain and Iraq – a
testament to the relative absence of systematic persecution at the time.

As a collection of texts, the lives of the martyrs represent one of the richest bodies of
evidence for understanding conversion in the early medieval Middle East. Yet these sources
must be treated with great caution. Saints’ lives are a notoriously formulaic genre, lled
with reports of miracles, literary motifs, and theological polemics which can make it
dif cult to know what “really happened”. Reading the sources alongside contemporary
Islamic texts, the book argues that many biographies have a strong basis in reality. At the
same time, they were shaped by the literary, social and spiritual priorities of their authors,
who were determined to create models of resistance for their ocks, who were increasingly
tempted by the faith and culture of the conquerors.

Christian Martyrs under Islam describes a lost world in which Muslims and Christians
rubbed shoulders in the most intimate of settings, from workshops and markets to city

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blocks and even marital beds. Not surprisingly, these interactions gave rise to overlapping
practices, including behaviours that blurred the line between the Islam and Christianity. To
ensure that conversion and assimilation went exclusively in the direction of Islam, Muslim
of cials executed the most agrant boundary-crossers, and Christians, in turn, revered
some of these people as saints.

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