The Tragedy of the Templars (6 page)

Following the Constantinople disaster, the caliph Umar II tried to appease rising discontent by decreeing that converts were exempt from the
jizya
and that they should receive equal soldier's pay. But the effect was to reduce the revenue coming into the treasury, and the shortfall was made up by treating the non-Muslim population, the
dhimmis
, all the more severely. Umar II is usually credited with formalising decrees determining the legal and social position of
dhimmis
. The basic position was that
dhimmis
were the People of the Book – that is, Christians and Jews whose prophets handed down the message that in its essence and its perfected form was recorded in the Koran. Therefore a certain tolerance and protection were owed to these people, to whom the Koran promised that the Muslims would not fight them on condition that they paid the
jizya
, a form of tribute. Christians and Jews stood outside the community; they were not allowed to carry weapons, or to bear witness against Muslims in courts of law, or to marry Muslim women. A
dhimmi
who attempted to convert a Muslim to his own religion paid with his life, as did any Muslim who apostasised. But a Muslim who killed a Christian or a Jew was subject not to the death penalty, only to a fine at most.
Dhimmis
had to be submissive and consider themselves inferior to Muslims and act and dress accordingly; they could not resemble Muslims in their clothing or the way they wore their hair. Christians and Jews were free to practise their religion, but in a subdued manner so as not to disturb Muslims; festivals and public expressions of faith were curtailed. They were not allowed to build new churches or synagogues, or to keep them in repair. If a place of worship was damaged or destroyed for any reason – earthquake, fire or mob action – it could not be rebuilt. After a time Zoroastrians of Persia and pagan Berbers of North Africa were also accepted as People of the Book. But no toleration was extended to those who were not People of the Book; to them the choice was Islam or the sword.

Despite these onerous and humiliating regulations, many Christians found an advantage in their condition. If the triumph of Islam had been enabled by the Byzantine Empire's long and exhausting conflict with Persia, it had also been helped by the fierce theological disputes that for hundreds of years had disturbed the unity of the Christian world. And so it is fitting, if ironic, that an effect of the Muslim conquests was to protect and preserve a considerable variety of Christian beliefs considered unorthodox and even heretical under Byzantine rule. To the Muslims these controversies were of little account; Islam was the revealed and perfected faith, and as for the Christians, and also the Jews, as long as they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their taxes, they were permitted to conduct their own affairs according to their own laws, customs and beliefs.

Christian heresy therefore flourished in the Middle East under Muslim rule, or rather, what was regarded as heresy by the authorities in Constantinople and by the popes in Rome. But here in the Middle East all Christian sects were treated alike, so that heterodox and heretic Christians were now freed from persecution by Christian orthodoxy or the state. For example, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a majority decided that Jesus had two natures, the human and the divine, adding that these were unmixed and unchangeable but at the same time indistinguishable and inseparable. This is the view of almost all Christian churches to this day. But Nestorius, a fifth-century archbishop of Constantinople who had been born in Syria and was trained at Antioch, held that the human and divine natures of Christ were entirely separate, and for this he was called a dyophysite (from the Greek for ‘two natures') and declared a heretic. Yet his adherents, who formed the Nestorian Church and were active missionaries, enjoyed a considerable following in the East, especially in Persia, where they contended against Zoroastrianism. In reaction to Nestorianism, and also in opposition to the orthodoxy put forward at the Council of Chalcedon, members of the Syrian Church, known as the Jacobites, and of the Egyptian Church, that is the Copts, while not denying the two natures, put emphasis on their unity at the Incarnation. For this the Syrians and Egyptians were called monophysites (from the Greek for ‘single nature'), and were charged with the heretical belief that Jesus' human nature had been entirely absorbed in the divine.

These arguments were of supreme importance, quite literally a matter of life and death, for the nature of Jesus was directly relevant to the salvation of man. Pope Leo I, ‘the Great', advanced the orthodox position that prevailed at the Council of Chalcedon: ‘God is believed to be both almighty and Father; it follows that the Son is shown to be co-eternal with him, differing in no respect from the Father. For he was born God of God, almighty of almighty, co-eternal of eternal; not later in time, not inferior in power, not dissimilar in glory, not divided in essence.' Having asserted the divine and timeless nature of Jesus, he argued that being born of the Virgin Mary, ‘this birth in time has taken nothing from, and added nothing to, that divine eternal nativity, but has bestowed itself wholly on the restoration of man'. Man is the beneficiary of the divine Jesus also taking on the nature of man, ‘For we could not overcome the author of sin and death, unless he had taken our nature, and made it his own'.
¹⁵

What exactly the parties to these disputes meant when they talked of the nature of Jesus Christ was affected by shades of language and culture as well as by ultimate principles. While the various Church councils hammered out the theological positions that became the orthodoxy of Rome and Constantinople, Christians in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere often held to their views and found themselves in conflict with, and felt oppressed by, the universal Church. Sometimes it was more local than that, with the rural population of, say, Palestine following monophysite beliefs while the established clergy in Jerusalem was soundly orthodox. The arguments could be bitter and had a divisive effect within the Byzantine Empire and helped prepare the way for the coming of Islam. As one figure of the Jacobite Church said of the Muslim conquest: ‘The God of vengeance delivered us out of the hands of the Romans by means of the Arabs. It profited us not a little to be saved from the cruelty of the Romans and their bitter hatred towards us.'
¹⁶

But soon Christians were regretting the welcome they gave the Arab invaders. Umar saw the danger of abusing the
dhimmis
, the source of Arab income, whom he compared to domesticated animals, as when he warned one of his governors:

But there were troubles nevertheless, as in 725–6, when Egypt's native population, still overwhelmingly Christian, revolted against discrimination and the burden of taxation under Muslim rule. In one incident, after a census of the Egyptian monasteries the monks were taxed for the first time. But that was not enough, as the medieval Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi wrote:

Sometimes the Arab tribes took matters into their own hands to compensate for the fall in their subsidies and pensions. Objecting to the tribes' extortion of non-Muslims, the caliph Yazid III told them in 744, ‘I will not tolerate your behaviour which causes the poll-tax payers to exile themselves from their country and see no future ahead of them'
¹⁹
– to which the tribes responded by accusing the caliph of being a heretic under the influence of Christianity. His successor Marwan II once again singled out the tribes of Palestine, saying, ‘You only want to rob the property of every dhimmi you encounter.'
²⁰

Towards the end of 744 the disaffection among the Arab tribes grew into a widespread rebellion that extended across Palestine and Syria. Damascus became unsafe, and Marwan II made Harran in northern Syria his capital instead. Edessa, Homs, Heliopolis (Baalbek in present-day Lebanon) and Damascus all rose in revolt and shut their gates to the caliph, who during the winter and summer of 745 sent his armies against them and drowned the rebellions in rivers of blood. Marwan himself commanded the bitter four-month siege of Homs, and afterwards, in the words of Theophanes the Byzantine chronicler, ‘he destroyed the walls of Heliopolis, Damascus and Jerusalem, killed many important people, and mutilated the people who remained in those cities'.
²¹

The problems faced by the Umayyad caliphs with the tribes, the
mawalis
and the
dhimmis
were particularly acute in Persia and Mesopotamia, where other resentments had long been stirring. In 680 Hussein, the son of Ali, the assassinated fourth caliph, had led an uprising against Damascus, but he and his followers were massacred by the Umayyad forces at Karbala, in present-day Iraq. His supporters saw his death as a wound at the heart of Islam, for Hussein was Ali's son by Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed, and so in a sense the Prophet's own blood had been shed at Karbala. For the partisans, or Shia, of Ali, Hussein's death was a martyrdom and also a stain on the Sunni, the orthodox Muslims, who constituted the greater part of Islam. From then on the Shia refused to accept as caliph any but Ali's descendants, while the Sunni barred the caliphate to the Prophet's descendants for all time. Although this issue was originally a theological and tribal dispute among the Arabs, it soon attracted disaffected
mawalis
, especially Persians, a proud and cultured people who resented being treated as inferiors.

Their sense of grievance, along with that of the Shia, was nurtured by the Arab family of Abbas, which claimed descent from an uncle of the Prophet Mohammed. In 746 rebellion broke out in eastern Persia; by 749 Mesopotamia had erupted in civil war; and in 750 the caliph Marwan II was defeated by the Abbasid leader Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah at the battle of the Zab, a tributary of the Tigris in northern Iraq, and was relentlessly pursued through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where he was captured and beheaded. Other members of the Umayyad house were hunted down and murdered. Only one scion of the family, Abd al-Rahman, escaped the destruction of his dynasty by fleeing to Spain, where he established the Emirate of Cordoba.

W
ITH THE OVERTHROW
of the Umayyads, Palestine and Syria would never again be the centre of the Muslim world. The Abbasids settled in Mesopotamia and in 762 established their capital on the site of a small Christian village called Baghdad
¹
at a strategic location on the Tigris river, where it was linked by a navigable canal to the Euphrates, which curved close by. The place was a natural crossroads for caravans across the desert from Syria and Egypt, for Byzantine products carried down the Tigris, and for shipments from India and China brought upriver from the Persian Gulf. ‘This island between the Tigris in the East and the Euphrates in the West is a market place for the world', said caliph Mansur, the founder of the city,
²
and indeed within a generation the seat of the Abbasid caliphate had become the mercantile and cultural capital of Islam in the East. In contrast, ‘the Abbasids ground Damascus underheel.'
³
Its walls were demolished, its population collapsed, and for a century the city disappeared from written records altogether. The whole of Palestine and Syria went into decline, and their populations fell; Muslims and
dhimmis
alike found themselves ‘oppressed by their new rulers and would more than once revolt against them'.
⁴
The Umayyad caliphate had been a time of relative order for Palestine and Syria compared with what was to come, ‘the enervating process of repeated military movements, internal revolt, and political instability producing chronic anarchy and cultural decline'.
⁵

In abandoning Damascus in favour of Baghdad, the Abbasids moved the Muslim empire into the orbit of Persian influence. The Umayyad caliphs had ruled in the patriarchal style of Arab chiefs, cajoling tribal leaders and sometimes enforcing their will upon them, but they were always approachable by their peers and consulted with them on significant matters. In contrast, the Abbasid caliphs increasingly adopted the manners and methods of Persia's Sassanian kings, whom the Arabs had overthrown a century earlier. Whereas Umayyad caliphs styled themselves the Deputy of the Prophet of God, Abbasid caliphs bore the awesome title of Shadow of God on Earth. They derived their authority directly from Allah and ruled as absolute autocrats. Dispensing with the Arab tribal militia and discontinuing their pensions, the Abbasids exercised power through a regular army of Turkish slaves called Mamelukes. Also they created a salaried civil service staffed mostly by Persian converts.

At the time of the Arab conquest most Persians were Zoroastrians, towards whom Muslims had an ambivalent attitude. The Prophet Mohammed regarded the Jewish and Christian prophets as his precursors, but he did not count the Zoroastrians as a people with a revealed scripture.
⁶
The Koran is explicit that Jews and Christians are People of the Book and therefore free to follow their own beliefs,
⁷
but the position of the Zoroastrians depended on the interpretation of a Koranic passage in which the Magians, as Muslims called the Zoroastrians, are mentioned in the same breath as Jews and Christians but also pagans.
⁸
While it came to be accepted that Zoroastrians should be accorded protected
dhimmi
status, their treatment at the hands of Muslims in the Umayyad period was ‘contemptuous and intolerable',
⁹
and under the Abbasids it was worse. The Abbasids proved deadly foes of Zoroastrianism, meting out harsh persecution on the one hand and lavishing patronage on converts with the other. The process began in the cities and towns where Arab garrisons were settled and where Zoroastrian fire temples were turned into mosques and populations forced to convert or flee. The work of mass conversion was extended to the countryside during the eighth century and was complete, except in pockets, a century later.
¹⁰