eChurch Blog

Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.

Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.

Pages 261 – 262

In the Middle East and around the African shore of the Mediterranean most Christians would now have to live with a new reality; they had lost their position at the centre of society. The new situation was at its most extreme in Arabia itself, where Muslims put into practice what was said to have been one of Muhammad’s deathbed commands and set about eliminating Christianity from the peninsula. After a century or so, there were only a few Christian communities left. In a symbolic annexation which echoes similar architectural appropriations by Christians from predecessor sacred buildings, the eighth-century Great Mosque in Sana’a in the Yemen incorporates columns from the demolished cathedral built there two centuries before by the Miaphysite ruler Abraha. It may be the result of a policy of thorough Islamic destruction that no trace remains of a Bible in Arabic which can be dated to the era of flourishing Christianity before the coming of Islam; on the other hand, given the Syriac character of the Arabian Churches before, maybe it had never existed.

Elsewhere, there was no such extreme policy of suppression, and in fact in most of these societies newly dominated by Islam two or more centuries passed before there was anything like a Muslim majority. Although to begin with there was no effort to fill the cities with Muslim converts, wherever a church or cathedral was a prominent central building, it was likely to become the main mosque. It was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over. Someone would have to do practical deals with the conquerors. In default of action from the shattered secular authorities, a number of Christian bishops followed the example of Sophronios’s surrender to Caliph Umar I in Jerusalem and negotiated permanent settlements. regardless of the era in which they were actually concluded, conventionally these came to be known collectively as the Pact or Covenant (dhimma) of Umar; this referred to a second Caliph called Umar (reigned 717-20), though the attribution may have been retrospective. The Pact had its precedent already in the Sassanian Empire. Christians and Jews as People of the Book (and later, by extensions of dubious logic but practical utility, other significant religious minorities) were organised into separate communities or millets, defined by their common practice of the same religion, which was guaranteed as protected as long as it was primarily practiced in private. they were given a specified tax burden and their second-class status was defined as that of a dhimmi (a non-Muslim protected under dhimma).

[.....]

Whether Christians found themselves oppressed in the new situation depended on the personality and outlook of the Muslim authorities. At various times discrimination was deliberately burdensome; so under a number of governors and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, who were the first conquerors and who ruled from Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians faced the destruction of churches and the strict enforcement of a host of petty humiliations and restrictions, while under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847-61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow – an anticipation of a measure which, in later centuries, Christian societies would take against their Jewish minorities in Europe.

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