Jack Tannous, The Making of the
Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers
Conor
Dube
Harvard University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2021
Volume 24.1
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv24n1prdube
Conor Dube
Jack Tannous, The Making of the
Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol24/HV24N1PRDube.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2021
vol 24
issue 1
pp 368-372
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File created by James E. Walters
Jack Tannous, The Making of the
Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 647; hardcover
$39.95.
Most modern scholarship on the medieval Middle East bases
itself on the writings of elite scholars in the region’s major religious
traditions, authors who were generally focused on elaborating complex
systems of theology and ideology. In this book, Tannous argues that the
implicit world created by centering such sources neglects the
overwhelming demographic reality of the period: that Middle Easterners
were largely illiterate, largely agrarian “simple believers” (Syr. hedyoṭē; Ar. ʿawāmm).
Remembering this population—and accounting for its halting, incomplete
transformation from the sixth to the eleventh centuries The
titular and passim division of this
period into ‘medieval’ and ‘late antique’ feels somewhat in
tension with the book’s attention to the continuities of these
two eras. See now Thomas Bauer, Warum es kein
islamisches Mittelalter gab: Das Erbe der Antike und der
Orient (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018), who prefers the
phrase “die islamische Spätantike.”—requires a
historiographic turn towards a bottom-up history of the “lived religious
experience of all the region’s inhabitants” (p. 8).
The book consists of four parts. The first, “Simple
Belief,” asks a pointed question: “Did the society of the late antique
Middle East resemble something like an advanced seminar in patristic
theology” (p. 15)? The obvious (negative) answer reminds us that the
interconfessional rivalry often foregrounded in the historiography of
Christian late antiquity would not have been legible to many of the
inhabitants of that world. Accounting for this “layering of knowledge”
(p. 57), theological elites competed for the allegiance of simple
Christians through an anxious mix of doctrinal compromise and
pragmatism.
The second part, “Consequences of Chalcedon,”
considers some of the ramifications of the haziness of late antique
confessional identity. The discussion of the Canons of Jacob of Edessa
in Ch. 3 is a particularly vivid example of a learned churchman’s
difficulties policing confessional boundaries, inchoate boundaries that
he himself was engaged in drawing. Church leaders used a broad arsenal
of tools in the campaign to sway simple believers to their version of
orthodoxy, including debate and “theological streetfighters” (Ch. 4);
the sacraments, especially the Eucharist (Ch. 5); and education,
particularly secondary schooling in scholastic centers (Chs. 6 & 7).
All of this was an attempt by the various confessions to create
“marginal differentiation” (p. 197), an advertising concept that Tannous
adopts to denote the strategies used by similar groups to stand out in a
crowded landscape of competitors.
Building on this approach, Part III (“Christians
and Muslims”) applies a similar analysis to the rise of the early
Islamic community. A religiously heterodox, under-catechized society was
the Sitz im Leben for the Qurʾān, which is “a
reflection of and reaction to Christianity as it existed on the ground
in the seventh-century Ḥijāz” (p. 252). This account is not entirely
convincing. For all the merits of reframing the Qurʾān as a document in
conversation with simple believers, I wish more attention were paid to
the text’s own complex and confrontational theology, its nuanced
intertextuality with Syriac homiletic and liturgical works, and the
importance of Jews in Muḥammad’s community—in Tannous’ terms, to the
layering of knowledge within the seventh-century Ḥijāzī population.
Indeed, the Qurʾān is perhaps our best document for the theological
sophistication possible on the peripheries of the late antique
oecumene.
Whatever its roots, Tannous argues that the
ideology of earliest Islam, less developed than contemporaneous forms of
Christianity, This is put rather starkly: “If Christian
orthodoxy in the seventh century can be compared to a perfectly
executed performance of a piece by Chopin (or Beethoven or
Mozart, depending on the Christian group), then we can hardly
say that Islamic orthodoxy even had a score in the same period”
(p. 261). More useful is J. E. Brockopp’s notion of Muslim
“proto-scholars”: see his Muhammad’s Heirs:
The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622–950
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). was
not the reason for the political success of the nascent Muslim
community. Most people in the lands of the early Islamic empire(s) would
have been ignorant as to the specific propositional contents of
Muḥammad’s message (Ch. 10), and conversion was driven more often by
temporal concerns than by matters of religious conviction (Ch. 11).
Moreover, the process of conversion was slow: Tannous asserts that
Muslims were a numerical minority in the Middle East “at least until the
Mamluk period” (p. 340).
The consequences of this religious inertia were
profound. Lived Christianity was a fact of daily life for almost all
medieval Middle Easterners, particularly in more rural areas. And much
like the Christian elite, Muslim scholars’ anxiety over the reality of
nebulous communal boundaries resulted in a raft of measures to try to
create in practice the separation that the theologians articulated in
theory. Such efforts, taken together with innumerable continuities
between pre-Islamic and Islamic practices (Ch. 8 & pp. 419–428),
indicate the ways in which the Middle East changed Islam, rather than
the more frequently interrogated effects of Islam on the Middle East.
Such a viewpoint historicizes Islam as a process, one linked intimately
to the large groups of simple Christian believers who peopled much of
region.
In the final part (“The Making of the Medieval
Middle East”), Tannous examines some of the most important loci for
Muslim-Christian connections: religiously heterogeneous families, daily
interactions, monasteries, festivals, converts (and the traditions they
brought with them), and prisoners of war (Ch. 14). He concludes (Ch. 15)
with a challenge to modern scholarship: can we let go of the idea that
the rise of Islam represented a “mass ideological change,” abandoning
the “sectarian” conception of medieval Middle Eastern history as Arab
Muslim history? And in so doing, could we do greater justice to what
life, particularly ordinary life, was like? Lastly, there is a very
useful appendix on Tannous’ approach to the sources and the problem of
authenticity.
Despite, and perhaps because of, the scope of the
book, there are topics the reader wishes received more attention. I will
limit myself to two points. First, Egypt. Albeit Tannous states that he
will focus mostly on “Syria, Palestine, and Iraq,” (p. 7), given the
book’s ambitious title a more thorough account of Egypt would have been
welcome. Egyptian evidence, though contradictory, complicates the book’s
argument for a slow Islamization lasting until the rise of the Mamluks
in the 13th century. Shaun O’Sullivan,
“Coptic Conversion and the Islamization of Egypt,” Mamluk Studies Review 10:2 (2006), 65–79;
but see the 10th-century geographer
al-Muqaddasī: “there are not many towns in Egypt, because most
of the people of the countryside [sawād]
are Copts, and according to the rule of this discipline of ours,
there can be no town [madīnah] without a
pulpit,” i.e., a mosque
(Descriptio Imperii Moslemici [Kitāb aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat
al-āqālīm], ed. de Goeje [Leiden: Brill, 1906],
193). It also provides vivid examples of the Islamic
administration’s fine-grained attention to matters of religious
affiliation (to the point of maintaining a registry of converts and
branding the hands of monks to control their movement). Wadād
al-Qāḍī, “Population Census and Land Surveys under the Umayyads
(41–132/661–750),”
Der Islam 82 (2008),
341–416. Finally, although it appears at points, one
wishes more use were made of the documentary wealth of Egyptian papyri
as an unequalled window into the daily lives of Christians and Muslims
alike.
Second, Tannous’ meticulous analysis of the textual
sources of both the Syriac and Arabic traditions is unfortunately not
turned to the panoply of relevant material evidence from the period.
Apart from passing references, the physical record receives short
shrift. Given the inevitable difficulties of recovering ordinary voices
from elite sources, this is a significant oversight. Tombstones,
graffiti, textiles, ceramics, images, coins, and the like all offer a
unique perspective on discourses of religious identification. E.g.,
Leor Halevi’s Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites
and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007) is a relevant and classic study missing
from Tannous’ extensive bibliography. David Frankfurter’s Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local
Worlds in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018) is a useful companion read demonstrating
the value of such sources. The inclusion of such
objects within Tannous’ analysis would have brought it closer to the
communities it seeks to describe.
These suggestions aside,
The Making of the Medieval Middle East offers
an eloquent and provocative corrective for traditional histories wherein
“the experience of a great deal of the region’s population is relegated
to a bit part and minor role in the telling of the region’s story, or
simply falls through the cracks” (p. 499). This is a tour de force of
scholarship, meticulously researched but also approachably lively. Our
understanding of the complex lives of the late antique and early
medieval worlds is much richer for its having been written.