Place, Practice, Patron: Making Religious Communities in the Early Medieval Jazīra

The author of the Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnin, an anonymous monk from the monastery of Zuqnin near Amida, says that many Christians from the countryside converted to Islam in Harran in 769 CE.¹ They became different from the people of faith in appearance and name, he adds, and they were repugnant just like their forefather Judas. They neither remained Christians nor learned much about Muhammad; they were a bizarre, ignorant, ridiculous hybrid “in between.” A new appellation was thus attributed to this converted group. They were called the “Ayduli,” a name referring to their false pretense of speaking Arabic.² With this account, the Chronicle of Zuqnin points at place, practice, and patron as three major components that constituted this new religious community. The emergence of the Ayduli was a northern Mesopotamian phenomenon, the group was distinguished from Christians and Muslims by their ignorant practices, and these converts gained a novel appellation because of their servitude to their new Muslim overlords in the footsteps of their ascribed forefather Judas Iscariot.

Drawing on this and other examples from Syriac literature, this article joins the lively debate on the making and separation of religious communities in Late Antiquity.³ I will analyze three, hitherto underexplored, eighth-century texts: The Life of Theodotus, Bishop of Amida (d. 698),⁴ the Life of Simeon of the Olives (d. 734),⁵ and the Chronicle of Zuqnin (eighth century). These texts are among the earliest non-Islamic writings that narrate everyday life under Islamic rule in the Jazīra.⁶ The previous postconquest Syriac literature of the seventh and eighth centuries consists mostly of theological writings about or brief mentions of Islam and Arabs.⁷ The focus of these three texts on the quotidian in regions far from the centers of Islamic government, as Islamic law and government slowly took shape, makes them invaluable resources for understanding life under early Islamic rule at the end of Late Antiquity.

In these texts, the authors often define religious communities through the aforementioned three factors: the place the group was located, the practices its members observed, and/or the leader(s) whom the members affiliated themselves with (or were assumed to affiliate with). Moreover, the texts underscore that religious communities were made and unmade within a variety of temporalities; some in fact seem to have lasted as briefly as a few years. Even though such dynamics played important roles in the formation of religious community in various periods and places in the premodern world (more on this to come), I argue that place, practice, and patron were understood to be increasingly pivotal to community formation in the early Islamic era (seventh and eighth centuries), by at least some Syriac authors. The intensification of this discourse of community formation was due in part to changing taxation practices and the broader legal and socioeconomic debates about the status of the dhimma, non-Muslim beneficiaries of Islamic state protection.⁸ In other words, as Islamic administration mapped and reorganized the demographics of the Middle East, place, practice, and patron became more principal in conceptualizations of communities at least in the Jazīra.

The end of Late Antiquity witnessed the emergence of Islam, but the ramifications of this phenomenon were felt only gradually. In the Jazīra, the emergence of Islamic rule was first perceived by indigenous groups as a series of military conquests followed by the political dominance of Arab tribes from the south.⁹ The conquerors levied taxes, often in ad hoc ways, through the local elite. The prominence of conquest and taxation and the absence of a systematized Islamic law, administration, or theology led local groups to understand the conquerors primarily in military and economic terms; Islam was not initially perceived as a new, legitimate, and organized religion. Things changed in the mid-eighth century: The Jazīra became an administrative unit, the types and amount of taxes increased, Islamic administration developed more defined articulations of the status of non-Muslim groups, and Islamic theological concepts began to take shape. As a result, what was initially perceived as an “Arab conquest” was now seen as a new, if inferior, imperial religion in the landscape.¹⁰ It was in relation to this new religion that other preexisting religious groups had to rearticulate their boundaries, a process that Michael Penn calls “a crisis of differentiation.”¹¹ In Lev Weitz’s words, “the inauguration of Muslim rule thus set in motion transformations to law, the family, the household, and other social institutions across the Middle East’s religiocommunal spectrum.”¹²

Scholarship on these developments has resulted in a lively and ongoing debate about how to incorporate the emergence of Islam into the story and study of Late Antiquity.¹³ While some aspects of the late antique world appear to have continued well into the Middle Ages, as Garth Fowden’s “first millennium” model suggests,¹⁴ other aspects of that world display more complex continuities and novelties before and after the emergence of Islam. The concept of “religious community” was one of those categories with a history of interlaced layers of meaning and articulation.

To take one illustrative example, scholars have demonstrated that Christians in Late Antiquity were not always visually distinguished from their neighbors, since their various social identities were articulated (or not) in different contexts with different tools.¹⁵ In the early Islamic milieu, however, at least in some places, Christians were required to wear a belt called a zunnār (from the Greek zōnarion) in order to visually mark their religious identity.¹⁶ The institution of kharaj and jizya taxes (land tribute and poll tax required of non-Muslims), even if they were imposed rather loosely by tax collectors, required some definition of the boundaries, size, and constituency of non-Muslim groups.¹⁷ To give yet another example, the development of the concept of dhimma, likewise, required new articulations of the institutions and social practices of various religious groups, referred to as the majūs, naṣārā, ṣābiʾūn, yahūd, and others in Islamic sources.¹⁸ In other words, the making of religious communities came to the fore as an important fiscal and legal question in the first two centuries of Islamic rule in the Middle East.

These shifts, of course, manifested in different places at different times. For the populations in the Jazīra, the key moment was the eighth century, as I will show. And the texts at the focus of this article—the Chronicle of Zuqnin, the Life of Theodotus, and the Life of Simeon of the Olives—are among the rare witnesses to these changes that impacted the communities in this region. With the events they narrate, most of which are unattested elsewhere, the texts capture what these developments meant for some of the Christians living under Islam.

These dynamics certainly render the early Islamic milieu special in terms of the making of religious communities, but they by no means imply a clear-cut distinction between “conventionally late antique” and “early Islamic” communities. While this article focuses on the early Islamic Jazīra, the analysis of these Syriac texts, all written in the eighth century in an area formerly in the borderland between the Eastern Roman and the Sasanian Empires, contributes to our understanding of Late Antiquity’s geographical and chronological boundaries. The authors of the texts built their narratives using the earlier late antique models of historiography and hagiography while repurposing those models in their early Islamic contexts. Thus, the redactor of the Chronicle of Zuqnin added his account of the events in eighth-century Mesopotamia to the chronicle that had originally been shaped by the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339), the Church History of Socrates of Constantinople (d. 440), the Chronicle of Edessa (sixth century), and the now lost second part of the Church History of John of Ephesus (d. 586),¹⁹ among other earlier historiographies. The grand narratives of Christianity composed by late antique historians, which make up the first three parts of the Chronicle of Zuqnin, were channeled and localized in the final section of the text into a chronicle that discusses events more narrowly within the early Islamic Mesopotamian countryside. Similarly, the authors of the Life of Theodotus and the Life of Simeon of the Olives use numerous hagiographical tropes familiar from late antique saints’ lives.²⁰ Yet, the authors express these notions in a new idiom that incorporates Arabo-Islamic terms for Syriac-speaking audiences, who were in the process of cultivating a familiarity with the Islamic state and culture. Zuqnin and the two lives analyzed here thus epitomize what it means for early Islam to participate in the world of Late Antiquity. In this aspect, the current analysis is a conceptual reflection on “religious communities,” as well as a contribution to the lively debate about the very definition of Late Antiquity.

It is now a consensus in scholarship that the notion of religion as a genus, with types like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism, is a categorization articulated in the post-Enlightenment era.²¹ Even if these and other religions were distinguished from and compared to each other in some premodern writings, the definition of religion in antiquity was entwined with notions of ethnicity, race, and orthodoxy. In this connection, studies of modern and premodern definitions of religion have subjected the term religious community to particular scrutiny. Following Rogers Brubaker, we can define a religious community, on par with ethnic, racial, and national communities, as “a mutually interacting, mutually recognizing, mutually oriented, effectively communicating, bounded collectivity with a sense of solidarity, corporate identity, and capacity for concerted action,” the commonality of which is defined and articulated in terms of religious belief, thought, and/or practice.²² Animated by Brubaker and others’ theorizations of “community,” various works on the formative centuries of Christianity indeed show that communities in antiquity were not fixed, coherent, and homogenous entities with purpose and agency but were constructed and contingent variables that needed to be articulated, activated, and mobilized by cultural entrepreneurs at the intersections of ethnicity, class, race, gender, and other factors.²³

Although the category of community has thus been destabilized for the earlier end of Late Antiquity, many scholars continue to apply this term unreflectively to developments that occurred during the later end of this period, which was shaped by the emergence of Islam. There is, however, a growing body of rigorous scholarship that studies religious groups in the early medieval Middle East. Studies on religious identity, conversion, dhimmī (protected non-Muslim subject) status, cultural transmission, theological debate, law, family, and conflict and violence have shed light on the making, remaking, and unmaking of religious communities.²⁴ And yet, in many of these scholarly works, the notion of community remains largely undertheorized, often treated as something that exists as a stable entity that people move in and out of.

Moreover, religious diversity in the early medieval Middle East is usually conceptualized in terms of encounter and exchange between confessionally or doctrinally separate groups. For example, we define the Middle East as a multiconfessional place populated by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Manichaeans, and pagans. Or we define this diversity through sectarian categories, such as Nestorian, Jacobite, and Melkite Christians, (proto) Shīʿī and Sunnī Muslims, and Rabbinic Jews. These categories are certainly useful tools that help us speak about the religious diversity in the early Islamic milieu. Yet, they also contribute to an understanding of diversity along axioms of confession, theology, and doctrine.²⁵ In other words, even if some contemporary religious experts did delineate groups within their social orbit along theological or doctrinal lines,²⁶ modern scholars should not simply replicate this discourse. Doing so leads to a simplistic understanding of the social categories and dynamics that were at work in the early Islamic period.

Granted, theology mattered in the late antique and medieval Middle East. Debates about doctrine and creed played an important role in the formation of distinct religious groups and practices. Liturgy and other forms of commemoration of the divine past, as well as prayer, funeral, and other rituals, were all formulated in connection to theological concepts and their articulations. Yonatan Moss shows, for example, how debates about the physical body of Christ shaped the conceptualizations of church and liturgy (social and liturgical bodies of Christ) in the sixth century.²⁷ Volker Menze’s reconstruction of the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon (451) likewise demonstrates the ramifications of doctrinal debates on the ground.²⁸ The continued prominence of theological articulation and debate during and after the Islamic conquests is visible in the seventh- and eighth-century Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings.²⁹ For example, Syriac theologians defined Islam as a means to reflect on intra-Christian controversies.³⁰ Early Islamic literature categorized Christians into “Nestorians,” “Jacobites,” and “Melkites,” reflecting the pronounced differences in Christology.³¹ Moreover, as Michael Morony points out, in the early Islamic Middle East, communities were separated based on how they legislated marriage, property, and other aspects of life, and these legal concerns led to community-building processes along doctrinal boundaries.³²

So, indeed, doctrine mattered. But there are two important issues that need emphasizing. First, theology did not make and separate communities by itself; it needed to be contextualized toward solidifying communal boundaries. Second, depending on the broader sociopolitical developments, theology sometimes played a secondary role in the formation of religious communities.

Recent studies, in fact, nuance our understanding of the processes of religious community formation in antiquity and the complex role of theology. For example, Thomas Sizgorich, building upon previous observations on a late “split” between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, likened the Jewish-Christian relationship to a “continuum of practices and identities that ran between two poles.”³³ David Frankfurter points out that discussions of “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and other religious categories as historical entities have led to notions that “religiosity in antiquity was a matter of belief and doctrine rather than practice and place.”³⁴ Christine Shepardson demonstrates the emotional aspects of preaching and place-making in the multiconfessional landscape of late antique Antioch.³⁵ Similarly, Sarah Porter argues that “spatial, discursive, and material enchantments fostered the more decisive affiliation of fourth-century Antiochene Christians with [the bishop] Meletios’s [d. 381] community instead of with his competitors,” pointing out the affective aspect of theological factionalism.³⁶ Felege-Selam Yirga has problematized the dichotomic view of Chalcedonian versus non-Chalcedonian division for the theologically more diverse religious landscape of late antique Egypt.³⁷ For the early medieval Middle East, Jack Tannous has demonstrated the porous confessional boundaries across which many simple believers code-switched.³⁸ And, Alison Vacca has shown the role of military alliances overwriting the confessional divisions in group formation in the early Islamic Caucasus.³⁹

Despite these and other important contributions, the implications of these observations regarding the dynamics of religious community formation, especially in the aftermath of the Islamic conquests, have yet to be sufficiently integrated into scholarship on this decisive period. The texts I focus on in this article, a chronicle and two biographies, offer important gateways to understanding the conceptualizations of religious communities in early Islamic Late Antiquity, if one wants to step beyond the well-explored literary boundaries of theological and polemical discourse prominent in other genres.

In what follows, I demonstrate the pivotal role of place, practice, and patron in the articulations of religious communities in the early Islamic Jazīra. This is not a model proposed in opposition to the role of theology and doctrine in the formation of groups; I rather aim to complicate our understanding of community formation processes by bringing to the fore how a few Syriac texts speak about groups, communities, and belonging (even though their authors were certainly knowledgeable and careful about theological disagreements). This model does not purport to be exhaustive. Certainly other factors, such as profession and kinship, could play an important role in religious group formation.⁴⁰ Moreover, even though I focus here on the early Islamic Jazīra, I do not claim to build a model that applies only to this time and place. The Jazīra certainly offers an interesting case, because it was one of the heartlands of Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and beyond, while at the same time being far from early Islamic administrative centers.⁴¹ In other words, the literature produced in a place far from Islamic oversight, densely populated by non-Muslims, and historically connected to the emergence of Syriac Christianity offers interesting cases of community formation.⁴² The examples I analyze are unique in this sense, but the model could be applied elsewhere as well. As I will mention shortly, similar models in fact have been proposed for different locations and periods, and I build on those analyses for my study of religious communities in the Jazīra. In the texts I study, doctrinal distinctions are pronounced, but communities are often described through their location, ritual practice, and leadership. This, I argue, was partly a ramification of the Islamic conquests. Practices of taxation on the ground and debates about the status of non-Muslims contributed to an articulation of religious communities that center the triad of place, practice, and patron.

A quick survey of the terms used in literature to refer to what we may translate as a religious community reveals the difficulty of pinning down what is meant by this term. The three texts discussed in this essay, for example, refer to Syrians (Suryoye), Nestorians (Nesṭuryone), Muslim or non-Muslim Arabs (Ṭayyoye), Jews (Yihudoye), Manichaeans (Maninoye), pagans (ḥanpe), and apostates (kopure) as distinct ethnoreligious identities. On the surface, this diverse vocabulary indicates that perceptions of ethnicity and orthodoxy were instrumental in drawing communal boundaries for the authors of these texts.⁴³ But as Brubaker cautions, a category is not a group.⁴⁴ Identity is not community. Ethnonyms do not capture the astounding diversity and dynamism of the early medieval Middle Eastern religious landscape in which many groups were made and unmade faster than the definitions and perceptions of the aforementioned categories changed. Religious community formation was part of, not equal to, the processes of long-term ethnic identity formation.⁴⁵ Therefore, when we encounter such terms in texts, we cannot assume to be reading about religious communities.

The texts use a variety of terms to refer to what one may translate as a community. Most commonly, ʿamo refers to a religious or ethnic group, often translated simply as “people.” Nestorians are referred to as an ʿamo in Chronicle of Zuqnin, for example.⁴⁶ Groups different in looks and worship (segdto) in the Abbasid army are referred to with the same term.⁴⁷ Turks are another ʿamo, “Godless and Magian” according to the chronicle.⁴⁸ We may generally presume that when a text mentions an ʿamo, it refers to a group with a common religion, although this religious commonality in the group is not always articulated.

Other terms were also used to refer to religious communities, complicating terminology and translation. The Syriac word ʿumro, for example, could refer to a monastery, monastic life, or a monastic community.⁴⁹ Whether monasteries were perceived as distinct religious communities, however, is a matter of debate.⁵⁰ Another relevant term is bet, which could be translated as a house, tribe, race, and land. A tribe or a clan could also be referred to as a šarbto or as a genso, sometimes interchangeably with bet. Bishop Theodotus’s household, for instance, was called “the Reading House” (bet qeryono).⁵¹ Theodotus’s house is distinguished from others by the practice of reading the scriptures, which raises the question of whether and under which circumstances a household should be identified as a religious community in and of itself. As Cam Grey has pointed out for Late Antiquity, family, household, and related notions were constructed variables defined according to moral formation, physical location, or other criteria.⁵² Syriac texts, too, display a complex understanding of the family’s place in religious communities, to which we will return. The expression bnay qrito/mdito (inhabitants, or literally “sons” of a village/city) is common in Syriac literature, and it, too, complicates our understanding of the constituency and boundaries of religious communities. Villages most likely started as fiscal communities with common tax liability institutionalized under the administration of local leaders in late antique Egypt, but they also displayed the nonfiscal interests of their leadership.⁵³ We can say the same applied to village settlements in northern Mesopotamia. As we will see, villages or towns were sometimes construed as communities with common religious practice, not merely as fiscal communities but also religious communities.

As this brief survey shows, the communal nouns that are employed in these sources prove so diverse and multivalent that they map poorly onto the actual social landscape. Indeed, they fall short not only because the meanings of the terms vary based on context but also because various communities mentioned in texts are referred to with specific appellations, sometimes without using any of these more generic communal nouns, like Ayduli. Furthermore, even when we can identify a community in a text, the “religious” aspect of that community may be elusive. A variety of terms used in Syriac texts can be translated as “religion,” such as haymonuto, dino, and segdto.⁵⁴ But whether a group with one of these types of religion was construed by others at the time as a religious community is a matter of debate. So, if doctrinal categories are too rigid to capture the reality on the ground and the terminology too multifaceted, how do we define and reconstruct religious communities in Late Antiquity? The literary descriptions and articulations of religious communities provide further guidance.

Let us go back to the example of the Ayduli. The author of the Chronicle of Zuqnin first points at Harran, a town described as a stronghold of paganism in Syriac and other literature.⁵⁵ He says that people came to Harran and apostatized to Islam without any compulsion.⁵⁶ He then names a few more locations for this phenomenon, “a great community (ʿamo sagiyo) from the lands of Edessa, Harran, Tella, Rišʿayno … Dara, Nisibis, Sinjar, and Callinicum.”⁵⁷ He thus explicitly places this convert group as a newly minted religious community in North Mesopotamia. The religious identification of the group as ignorant apostates was a product of this place where conversion to Islam was common by the eighth century, but knowledge about Arabic culture was limited, especially in the countryside. It was a region fragmented along confessional boundaries in the pre-Islamic period, where “loyalties were local or locally expressed” and groups placed their trust in the walls around their settlements, in local saints, and their relics.⁵⁸ In the early Islamic period, too, the Jazīra remained fragmented, and it began to be ruled by newly settled tribal leaders.⁵⁹ As a result of these local circumstances, this group pretended to speak Arabic with their Muslim overlords without actual knowledge of the language or Islamic teachings.⁶⁰

Yuliya Minets demonstrates that in Late Antiquity, gradual changes in language—syntax, vocabulary, and morphology—were interpreted by some Latin- and Greek-speaking Christian authors as signs of sin or moral corruption.⁶¹ The description of the Ayduli shows that such anxieties around language changes are also present in Syriac texts. The coming of Islamic rule, the Arabic language, and the subsequent shifts in the use of language in ways that were deemed careless or utilitarian—and thus sinful—represent a form of linguistic disaster. And linguistic disaster led in turn to communal disaster, namely, the formation of new, heterodox communities in North Mesopotamia. The place, northern Mesopotamian countryside, as manifest in the previous list of toponyms, was highlighted in the chronicler’s account of the emergence of the Ayduli.

The Chronicle of Zuqnin no doubt mentions this group in heresiographic terms, and it is common in heresiography to map licit and illicit belief and practice.⁶² Still, the chronicler’s attempt to place the Ayduli on the map of the Jazīra should be contextualized within the broader demographic discourses of his time. In seventh- and the eighth-century Jazīra, the newly emerging Muslim elite tasked the indigenous elite with collecting taxes on their behalf. An important component of this process was documentation; Christian and Muslim sources mention various decrees that requested individuals and groups to return to their homeland and register themselves for tax purposes.⁶³ The Chronicle of Zuqnin records these changes in the following way:

Although this statement is about dispersal and relocation, it indicates that communities were reorganized, for tax purposes, with an inconvenient degree of (targeted) spatial precision, as the disheartened mention of the registers of names and property shows. This spatial reorganization of who belongs where was a major factor underlying our author’s focus on the location of religious communities.

Moreover, the author of the chronicle despises the Ayduli not merely for trying to speak Arabic but also for using the language to report on the location of the rest of the converts (who were exempt from the taxes levied on non-Muslims). The author says that Muslims asked “where is so-and-so, son of so-and-so” to locate the converts who registered on lists, and the Ayduli answered in Arabic, pointing at the locations of those converts.⁶⁵ The spectacle of Muslims searching for people in the countryside is at the center of this report about the emergence of a new religious community.

The importance of place in the making of communities is also underscored elsewhere by the author of Zuqnin. For example, he describes the village of Ḥaḥ as follows: “In the region of Dara there was a big and mighty village with a large community (ʿamo rabo) in it. Its inhabitants were simple (pšite) people and great laborers, better than everyone around them. And they were more faithful (mhaymone) than everybody in their region. They were also very attached to the monks and were honoring their priests as if they were angels because they were devoid of any earthly prudence and occupied with only their work.”⁶⁶ The village of Ḥaḥ is here explicitly referred to as a religious community and distinguished from other villages in the region by the naive piety of its inhabitants. Later in the story, we read how this group’s bonds with their bishops and monks were dissolved when they started following an illicit preacher, a preacher from Takrit, to whom we will return.

The Life of Theodotus does not contain the type of embellished prologue found in many late antique Syriac saints’ lives,⁶⁷ but instead it starts directly with a note about the origins of the holy man in the city of Amida.⁶⁸ Later in the Life, after having traveled at length to the Holy Land and the Egyptian desert, Theodotus dreams that he is destined to become a bishop in Amida, where he had been born and raised.⁶⁹ In his narration of Theodotus’s tenure as bishop, the hagiographer presents the Christians of Amida, which included Jacobite, Melkite, and likely Nestorian factions,⁷⁰ as a single ecclesiastical unity under the holy man’s jurisdiction. In one story, an unrepentant monk is excommunicated from the city and from Christianity itself (Krestyonuto), the two—the city and Christianity—appearing almost as synonyms.⁷¹ On various occasions, especially in his final sermon, Theodotus prays for the city of Amida and its people.⁷² The bishop’s city and the city’s inhabitants play center stage in the Life of Theodotus to the extent that the Amidans (Christian and Muslim) and their succession of bishops appear as a community distinguished from other cities and their bishops.⁷³

We see a similar focus on location in the Life of Simeon of the Olives. The Suryoye (Syrian Orthodox Christians) in northern Mesopotamia, between Nisibis, Harran, and the mountains of Ṭur ʿAbdin, are portrayed as if they feel and act in unison. Nestorians of Nisibis appear as the collective opponent,⁷⁴ while Muslims in Baghdad and Nisibis are powerful yet heretical outsider groups that are also anchored to specific cities.⁷⁵ But, alongside these grand confessional divisions that correspond—in the author’s mind at least—to the map of northern Mesopotamia, the Life depicts many villages as separate, autonomous communities scattered across the landscape. When Simeon and his companions arrive at the village of Esyaʿ in Ṭur ʿAbdin, the leaders send messengers to prevent their entry into the village and to chase them away.⁷⁶ The author says that these villagers were like barking dogs; even pagans and Jews would not be so hostile. Bishops and other religious experts traveled throughout the countryside for purposes of evangelization and holding the liturgy in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.⁷⁷ With such episodes of rejection and hostility, the Life of Simeon underlines that these visits created specific experiences for the visitors and the receivers of those visitors, which were based on the particularities of the location.

At the same time that the Life of Simeon maps the northern Mesopotamian countryside with episodes about the holy man’s experiences in various villages and towns, it also promotes one specific village, Ḥabsenus in Ṭur ʿAbdin, where Simeon was born. During his time as the bishop of Harran, Simeon is said to have built churches, monasteries, a stylite’s tower, and mills in his native land.⁷⁸ The author describes the books, liturgical vessels, relics, and other gifts that Simeon donated to Ḥabsenus and speaks about the clerics, teachers, and monks who started to dwell there. As a gesture to his generous patronage, the main church in the village, which was formerly dedicated to Simon Peter, was reconsecrated in the name of Simeon of the Olives.⁷⁹ The village became a community with distinct buildings, sacred objects, clergy, and other religious experts, all united around the person of Simeon.⁸⁰

According to the Life, a part of Simeon’s extended family, consisting of scribes and teachers, moved from the village of Ḥabsenus and settled in the village of Bet Manʿem near the Monastery of Mor Gabriel to be physically close to the monastery.⁸¹ This group is known as the “family of Mor Timothy,” the author says.⁸² This example is important not only because it highlights the importance of place but also because it demonstrates the mobility of communities, especially in the context of the family and the household. Place anchored a community, which could then be moved elsewhere with a household. As mentioned, we do not have clear evidence for whether families and households were perceived as distinct religious communities in the early medieval Jazīra. Given that the Umayyad taxation system initially grouped non-Muslims according to male heads of families,⁸³ it is likely that families were seen as distinct religious communities, defined by place (like Simeon’s family in Ḥabsenus) while also being mobile, according to the family’s multigenerational vision and needs.

This account of Simeon’s family members relocating near a monastery underscores another intricacy in the discussion of place: Were monasteries perceived as distinct religious communities in the early Islamic Jazīra? Our texts highlight the role that a monastery might play in generating a sense of belonging not only among their inhabitants but also among those who chose to live in its shadow. In this example, members of Simeon’s family move away from their village community and join the monastic community at Mor Gabriel. In the Life of Theodotus, Theodotus stays at various monasteries and experiments with their specific practices until he finds the right monastic community in Amida.⁸⁴ The differences between monastic communities in such passages are often articulated in terms of theological allegiances. But sufficient examples indicate that doctrinal separations did not prevent monasteries from becoming theologically mixed communities. The Life of Theodotus recounts how a Nestorian monk was allowed to take residence at a Syriac Orthodox monastery thanks to his carpentry skills.⁸⁵ Although such episodes are less frequent than those that underline theological differences, they provide important insight regarding what factors constituted a religious community: A monastery, with its particular location, its legendary founders, and its distinctive traditions, could be construed as a religious community in and of itself by the inhabitants of the early medieval Jazīra.

This identification was further reinforced by the fact that monasteries served as centers of both religious and nonreligious education as well as sites of theological articulation, manuscript production, and economic activity.⁸⁶ Monasteries could own villages, serving as spaces of patronage and governance between lay people and the Islamic government. The Chronicle of Zuqnin reports instances in which monasteries were asked to declare their real estates for taxation purposes.⁸⁷ In the Life of Theodotus, too, a tax collector levies the land tribute on a monastery based on the number of monks inhabiting it and threatens Theodotus, then residing at the monastery, with levying the poll tax on him.⁸⁸ Of course, institutions are not the equivalent of communities, and in literature, we have the representations of institutions through which we aim to see communities. Still, literary evidence suggests that Muslims and Christians might have seen distinct religious communities when they looked at monasteries in the early medieval Jazīra.

The Life of Theodotus and the Life of Simeon do not speak for all Christians or even for all Syriac-speaking Christians. Instead, they make visible to us groups of Syriac Orthodox (Jacobite) Christians in Amida and especially in Ṭur ʿAbdin, along with their localized approaches to religious authority and practice. Similarly, in these texts there is no broad understanding of “the Islamic community” but rather of Muslims of Amida, Nisibis, and other specific places. The authors of these texts were cultural entrepreneurs promoting the veneration of these holy men while envisioning local, unified Syriac communities distinguished from Jewish, Muslim, Nestorian, and pagan groups in the same place. Alison Vacca’s observations about religious communities in the early Islamic Caucasus apply to our material here, for Vacca says, “There was no coherent or unifying concept of Armenianness, Albanianness, Georgianness, or Arabness in the Caucasus, let alone Muslimness or Christianness. Ethnicity and religion were significant markers of identity, but they were multiform and did not necessarily inform loyalties and allegiances. Communities did not emerge from monolithic and universal categories of ethnicity or religion, but from shared concerns localized in specific places and moments in time.”⁸⁹

It is common for hagiographical texts to promote shrines, settlements, and landscapes through the story of a holy man or woman in order to create a sacred geography and promote the veneration of those holy men and women at those particular places. The geographic particularity in our texts, however, is not merely a hagiographical reflex. The authors placed various religious communities in the landscape, at particular locations, in a context where, as explained, taxation under Islamic government required individuals and families to relocate and unite in ways that eradicated their earlier settlement patterns. The communities of Simeon and Theodotus should be defined against this backdrop of the gaze that the Islamic administration cast upon the landscape of the Jazīra and its inhabitants.

When it comes to making religious communities, the relationship between location and community is not always self-evident. As recent research underlines, place by itself does not make a community; it needs to be activated, articulated, and imagined in ritualized ways to be a common or communal place.⁹⁰ Let us turn to these methods of articulation of place in our texts, namely through practice and leadership.

At various points, the author of the Chronicle of Zuqnin separates Jews, Christians, and Muslims based on what these groups do. During a severe draught, for example, he says, every community asked for divine intercession according to their custom. “Christians came out with their bishops leading them, and the Jews with their trumpets, and the Arabs also, and the Lord willed and showed us mercy.”⁹¹ In another passage, the author says that during a famine, Jews and Arabs buried their dead in holes in the ground while Christians used burial chambers, thus distinguishing Christian burial customs from those of others.⁹² Zuqnin certainly displays an understanding of religious diversity that consisted of Christians, Jews, and Arabs/Muslims, who had their specific customs of prayer and burial. Yet within these three categories, communities were further divided based on practice.

The eucharist was arguably the most prominent practice that divided Christian communities from each other, in Late Antiquity and beyond.⁹³ This ritual was shaped by theological articulations of biblical narrative; a person could end up in the camp of the orthodox or the heretics based on the type of eucharist they received. Interestingly, our texts do not focus on the right versus the wrong eucharist. Rather, they emphasize the role of festival and other forms of commemoration of the divine past in making communities.⁹⁴ A Nestorian festival celebrating the Ark of Noah, for example, is narrated with an outsider’s gaze in the Chronicle of Zuqnin, not with an emphasis on the Nestorian heresy but on the festival that revolves around the commemoration of the Ark.⁹⁵ Similarly, according to his Life, Theodotus of Amida, after building a monastery at Qeleth in Ṭur ʿAbdin, established a festival there, which completed the community-building process by placing this community on the annual liturgical calendar of the region with a specific festival.⁹⁶

Descriptions of such festivals are, in some cases, articulated in doctrinal terms. The Nestorians who commemorate the Ark of Noah are punished at the end of the story with a God-sent fire, which is nothing other than a sign of heresy, according to the author. Nevertheless, the author’s extensive description of the festival and the destruction of the community at the end of the story, vis-à-vis his brief mention of the heresy, is noteworthy. Orthodoxy and heresy very much mattered for the author of Zuqnin. But, it is practice—in this case, the commemoration of the Ark of Noah—through which the Nestorian community on Mount Kardu is constituted. That community and their festival came to an end simultaneously with the same divine act.

Let us look at other examples that define communities through what they do. One of the lengthy accounts in Zuqnin narrates an annual Manichaean ritual of divination through human sacrifice in Harran.⁹⁷ Even if the narrative about this festival is purely fictional, for our purposes here it is worth noting that the author of the chronicle defined the haymonuto (religion) of the Manichaeans through what they did. The ritual’s absurd atrocity eventually brings destruction upon the Manichaeans in Harran. But this destruction is not brought about by divine punishment, as in the case of the Nestorians on Mount Kardu. Rather, the community is shattered by a military persecution carried out by the Muslim governor. The story of the Manichaeans dispersed across the landscape due to their religious practice functions as a reminder of the precarity of the dhimmī status under Islam. Religious practice, in this report, distinguished a community (the Manichaeans in Harran) from others in the diverse religious landscape of the Jazīra and underscored that the Muslim government saw religious communities primarily through their religious practices.

The author of Zuqnin distinguishes other groups by their practices as well. According to the author, the aforementioned Ayduli removed their belts (zunnār), publicly renounced Christ, and started praying toward the south after converting to Islam.⁹⁸ Different types of pagans—worshippers of the sun, the moon, stars, horses, and others—are said to have come together in the Abbasid army.⁹⁹ Practice distinguished between various Muslim groups as well; the Muslims who favored ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAlī as the next caliph in the Jazīra wore white as a symbol of their religious and political allegiance.¹⁰⁰ Form, direction, object of worship, and model of articulation of loyalty contributed to the making and separation of religious communities.

In a similar vein, the author of the Life of Simeon relates that after Simeon was elected the bishop of Harran, he instructed those Harranians “who were sick with Manichaeism, paganism, and Judaism” and told the Jews in the surrounding villages “not to slaughter a goat or any other domestic animal on a Sunday, except in cases of mortal danger.”¹⁰¹ These instructions are recognizable manifestations of clerical concerns about heterodox practice. Simeon of the Olives was one of numerous clerics who tried to solidify communal boundaries by prescribing and proscribing practice. For the early Islamic Jazīra, we likewise know of the Syriac Bishop Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), whose articulations of the canon and church leadership shed great light on these concerns.¹⁰² Islam’s influence on the conceptualizations of religious practice in this milieu is apparent. Religious practice was an essential factor in the hardening of otherwise fluid communal boundaries. Monitored, accepted, or prohibited by the Muslim overlords in ad hoc ways, practice could make or drastically unbind communities under Islamic oversight.

These examples are, of course, literary representations of religious acts and practice, which cannot be assumed to have taken place historically. Nevertheless, the utility of these literary passages stems not from their potential accuracy in fully capturing historical events but from their collective emphasis on the importance of practice. Since such stories reached broader audiences at monasteries, parish churches, shrines, and other contexts through oral narrations and public readings, they presumably shaped, and were shaped by, the values and norms of those communities that produced them.¹⁰³ It has been pointed out that not only stories but also clerical letters, epitaphs, and other documents were also ritually read aloud in village communities as a way to establish religious authority and provide spiritual guidance.¹⁰⁴ We can, therefore, assume that the authors of these texts aimed at instructing their audiences on the importance of the transformative power of practice, even while that very notion already made and unmade communities on the ground.

The role of practice in the making of communities in Late Antiquity has been pointed out by numerous scholars.¹⁰⁵ Todd Berzon shows in his study of heresiology that numerous heretical groups are named after the practices they followed; they were identified by their conduct.¹⁰⁶ The role of human agency, will, and reflexivity within broader societal structures that shape communal practice has also been discussed.¹⁰⁷ Religious practice, like other forms of practice that individuals observe within their communities, does not operate in a vacuum; it is produced by a combination of religious authority, cultural articulation, and human and nonhuman actors (such as animals, natural phenomena, and spiritual beings). Not all of these elements are articulated explicitly in our texts. One component, however, stands out as a defining factor for religious communities, namely, the allegiance the group displays, de facto or symbolically, to a founding figure or a charismatic leader, which brings us to the third component of our analysis.

The author of the Life of Theodotus reports that once Theodotus started to gain renown in the region, Christians said, “a great prophet has arisen among us; and God has visited his people.”¹⁰⁸ This moment of communal acceptance, veneration, and hope is no doubt a hagiographic trope. A group’s adherence to a particular preacher or thinker, and the articulation of that connection in prophetic terms, was a common aspect of religious communities in Late Antiquity—Arian, Donatist, Nestorian, Jacobite, Meletian, and Manichaean being only a few of the many well-known examples.¹⁰⁹ Whether the average person in Late Antiquity would have known about the details of these figures’ teachings and the practices they prescribed is a matter of debate.¹¹⁰ Still, the idea that messengers and philosophers corresponded to specific communities was a convention of Late Antiquity. Emphasizing this point, Jae Hee Han defines religious communities through their connections to various genealogies of prophets and teachers.¹¹¹ Mani’s followers’ participation in and separation from the Elchasaite community (a Jewish-Christian group in Mesopotamia who adhered to the teachings of Elchasai and performed ritualized baptisms of purification) were functions of the adherence to a common or separate lineage of biblical prophets.

The praise of Theodotus as a new leader, expressed in prophetological terms, is hardly surprising in light of the fact that communities in Late Antiquity, especially in the countryside but also in urban settings, had to rely on civic and clerical leadership for survival under imperial fiscal and other policies and for prosperity in their more immediate local contexts.¹¹² Local notables, military elites, and religious clergy often worked in collaboration in economic production, physical and spiritual protection, tax collection, conflict resolution, maintenance of daily order, and organization of responses during crisis. The importance of local leaders remained a constant in many places in the eastern Mediterranean and elsewhere with the coming of Islamic rule.¹¹³ Still, as previously mentioned, Islamic rule also remapped the landscape with new centers of administration, new offices in charge, and new networks of power. Therefore, Theodotus’s leadership should be anchored in this specific context, not because this was essentially a new model of leadership with a clear break from the leadership models in Late Antiquity but because the people around him looked at a different horizon, which inevitably impacted the construal of leadership and patronage.

Observing the degree to which the Abbasids reorganized the governance of villages, Lajos Berkes, following Petra Sijpesteijn, says that in eighth-century Egypt, “gradual individual tax liability was introduced at village level, which made the principal of the collectively liable village koinon clearly obsolete.”¹¹⁴ But this discourse of a “stark shift” obscures the role of the patron for the making and sustenance of communities. As Chase Robinson highlights, local elites, both Muslim and non-Muslim, often collaborated with the Islamic government, with the prospects of gaining considerable economic and political power.¹¹⁵ Some Christian provincial elite families, like the Gumoye and Rusapaye, and Muslim families in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere cultivated power through their connections to the Islamic government.¹¹⁶ Non-Muslim individuals and families could become mawāli (clients) and thus enter the Arab tribal system and tighten their relationships with the government and the higher Muslim elite.¹¹⁷ The power to be able to navigate the taxation system and to provide protection and patronage indeed became a focal point in arguments about good leadership in the early Islamic milieu.¹¹⁸ So, the leaders and leadership described in our eighth-century texts merit further elaboration.

The texts mention people of various levels of impact who have gained a following and catalyzed group formation and separation, some briefly, others long term. Leaders of religious communities included civic leaders, nonordained religious experts and entrepreneurs, and other charismatic figures referred to with a variety of terms, including nbiyo (prophet), riš (notable, leader), mdabrono (leader, guide), and arkon (administrator).¹¹⁹ In the accounts that narrate the role of such leaders and experts, we see religious communities as a function of human relationships, bound to the temporalities of those relationships.¹²⁰ In the context of the early Islamic Jazīra, these relationships were further complicated by the shifting dynamics of elite networks, local patronage, and the increased need of rural groups for social and economic advocacy in the face of Islamic administration.¹²¹ Let us look at the ways the texts describe the role of leadership in the making of communities.

The Chronicle of Zuqnin reports an event when John bar Daddi, a lay person from the village of Pheison in northern Mesopotamia, gathered all the region’s inhabitants and proceeded to solidify his authority against other civic and military leaders. He not only appointed ranks of command in the region but also requested the inhabitants to swear allegiance to him in a church.¹²² In this passage, John’s followers are referred to as “the people of the mountain.” Most of his followers were apparently Christians, and they are portrayed in opposition to the Arabs who dwelled in the city and followed their own leader. John made strategic use of religious space, concepts, and expressions (e.g., pledging allegiance in a church) to solidify his military leadership at this rural locale. Leadership was precarious. It had to be discursively, materially, and performatively articulated. And it had to survive within an Islamic frame of protection and persecution. John bar Daddi mustered sufficient support to resist Arabs, but a certain Cyrus in Harran, a leader of Christians in that city, was put to death for accusations of apostasy after converting to Islam.¹²³

In this new economy in which clerics and lay people could step into positions of leadership, individuals and communities could fall prey to “false prophets” or other suspect leaders. In fact, our texts place a heavy emphasis on the problem of illegitimate leadership. The Life of Theodotus mentions a “diviner” who gained a large following through his in-depth knowledge of the scriptures because people thought he was a prophet.¹²⁴ Similarly, as mentioned, the Chronicle of Zuqnin reports that a big crowd followed a preacher from Takrit who reportedly tried to heal the sick and proclaim the future, all through illegitimate practice.¹²⁵ The author expresses his shock and anger while describing the way this “false prophet” blessed the holy oil with his spit and forged other religious practices. And yet, as the author relates, the villagers staunchly defended him, stopped working their fields, and went to pray with him. After the preacher was imprisoned by clerics, people came to visit him in prison, where he gave blessings and holy oil. Even if this event never took place, the author’s anxiety was real. It could take only one village to confirm fame and authority on an aspiring leader, and thereby put a new community on the map.

The author implies that this preacher’s error partially stemmed from the fact that he was not properly ordained and thus had not had conferred upon him the right to hold authority in the region. The legitimacy of ordination is often positioned as a preventative measure against disunity in our texts. For example, after the patriarch John of Callinicum died, bishops wanted to “eliminate all the partisans among them so that they might become one people and might submit to one leader like the law which was established and signed by the holy fathers.”¹²⁶ But, in practice, such ideals hardly prevented social divisions. The literature is replete with clerics and their followers condemned and anathematized together as a group.¹²⁷ Scholars interpret these episodes as witnesses to a religious landscape defined by competing communions.¹²⁸ Yet, if we step beyond the agendas of authors who aimed to emphasize the importance of the right communion, we may assume that these episodes also testify to the variety of clerics, communions, and allegiances available to lay people and thus to the complexity of communal affiliation. Confessional code-switching was commonplace, as Jack Tannous rightly emphasizes.¹²⁹ Moreover, religious leadership was not a one-directional power dynamic, for communities frequently banded together to oppose, refuse, or dispose of appointed clerics.¹³⁰ Nonordained religious entrepreneurs and ordained clerics alike could bring new communities into existence through their charismatic leadership and religious expertise, even while their authority might remain more or less precarious.

The religious diversity of the early medieval Middle East has often been narrated in terms of sectarian differences and doctrinal boundaries. This story reflects the bias of the surviving literary record, which speaks relentlessly about orthodoxy, heresy, spiritual purity and pollution, and theological debate and disagreement. While these concepts certainly played an important role in the making of religious communities in this period, an overreliance on these concepts as axiomatic categories of distinction has too often led scholars to misrepresent the social groupings as entities formed exclusively around creed and doctrine. Such an approach, I have suggested, obscures and flattens the historical and discursive dynamism with which groups were made and unmade.

As a step toward complicating this picture, a growing number of scholars have gone back to the textual and material evidence to find philological, narratological, and other glimpses of how groups and belonging worked in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this essay, I join this conversation about the reconstructions of “religious communities” by focusing on three eighth-century Syriac texts produced in the early medieval Jazīra. These texts are rare examples of Syriac literature that witness and extensively narrate the socioeconomic changes in the countryside of northern Mesopotamia following the Islamic conquests of the Middle East in the seventh century. And, in each case, the author is particularly concerned with the delineation of communal boundaries. Hence, this group of texts illuminates how the emergence of a new imperial religion in the Middle Eastern landscape gradually reframed the economic, legal, and social dynamics that governed the making and unmaking of religious communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

As we have seen, the three texts speak about Syrians (Suryoye), Nestorians (Nesṭuryone), Muslim Arabs (Ṭayyoye), Jews, (Yihudoye), Manichaeans (Maninoye), and various types of pagans (ḥanpe). The use of these terms indicates that ethnic and doctrinal categories were often inextricable in this context. But when we analyze how the texts represent these and other groups, we see a more complex understanding of religious community and how this notion governed affiliation, allegiance, and belonging. In most cases, what we may designate as a “religious community” appears in relation to the group’s geographical location, the practices its members adhered to, and/or the leadership its members followed. The texts thus disclose a diverse and dynamic religious landscape in which theological difference and debate occasionally appear to have been sidelined, while location, practice, and leadership took center stage. These observations have led me to propose a model for community formation grounded in the three interlocking categories of place, practice, and patron.

The place-practice-patron model developed here contributes to our understanding of the cultural and sociopolitical shifts in the transitional period ushered in by the Arab conquests and the emergence of Islam in the seventh century. Military conquests, introduction of a new governing class, new systems of taxation, and the ramifications of the legal category of the “protected” non-Muslim communities under Islamic administration all contributed to the shaping of the map of the Middle East, both literally and metaphorically. While there were significant continuities between the earlier centuries of Late Antiquity and the early Islamic milieu, these dynamics led to reconceptualizations of religion, diversity, community, belonging, and heresy, among other notions. As scholars have noted, thorough studies of this transformative period, with close attention to continuities and change at local and larger scales, are essential for our understanding of Late Antiquity. The texts I focus on in this essay, which bear witness to this milieu from a distinctively rural perspective, join the growing body of sources that enable us to bring the desired nuance to the study of Late Antiquity.

The Chronicle of Zuqnin, the Life of Theodotus, and the Life of Simeon destabilize narratives of community building in the early Islamic Jazīra that are fixated on doctrinal differences. The narratives these texts include offer important details about who made a community, in what ways a community could begin and end, and how long a community could last. The authors mention converts trying to speak Arabic, villages abandoning their clerics and following more charismatic preachers, families moving near monasteries, military leaders authorized by the eucharistic bread, and numerous other instances of communities consolidating and dispersing at the intersection of place, practice, and patron.

Read cumulatively, these details show how the notion of religious community was reformulated against the backdrop of the emergence of Islamic imperial practices and policies. This observation offers an important corrective to the grand narrative of a multiconfessional Middle East in which “Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and others [were] living under Islamic governance,” which falls short of capturing the complexity and dynamism of the religious landscape in this period and place. This study thus joins the growing body of scholarship that underscores the heterogeneity, precarity, and contingent nature of religious communities by pointing out that this dynamism in the articulations of religious communities was sometimes caused by external, nonreligious developments.

In addition to contributing to our understanding of the making of religious communities in antiquity, my analysis also joins the scholarly conversation about the periodization of Late Antiquity. The historical context at the focus of this article, the early Islamic Jazīra, displays interesting continuities and breaks from the time when this area was on the borderland between Byzantium and Persia. Institutional structures (of government, education, and military) appear to have been considerably reformulated after the Arab conquests, while literary models and material culture went through considerably slower processes of change. The texts I analyze here preserve those “conventionally late antique” models of historiography and hagiography while applying them to a new institutional landscape gradually shaped by Arabo-Islamic culture. The context of these texts thus render them invaluable material to think with about what it means for the early Islamic era to be a part of and participant in the world of Late Antiquity.