The Patriarch and the Caliph

Medieval Baghdad was an entangled world for the Christians and Muslims who lived and even partied together.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

A painting of a Sultan's court gathering round as a ambassador is presented.

Receiving the Ambassador.

Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

As we seek to understand and grapple with the nature of Muslim-Christian relations in today’s world, we should not imagine that we have to reinvent the wheel. Throughout their shared history, many millions of Christians have lived within Muslim societies and alongside Muslim neighbours, and their experiences, absent from the history of western Europe, offer valuable perspectives for understanding and navigating our current global landscape.

In 782 Patriarch Timothy was summoned for an audience with the Muslim Caliph al-Mahdī at his court in Baghdad. Timothy, just two years into his tenure as Patriarch, was one of the youngest to so far hold the title. As the head of the Church of the East, he oversaw communities scattered across an immense distance, from Syria to China, Sri Lanka to the Kazakh steppe; more believers, indeed, than the Pope in Rome. He himself came from a village near Erbil in northern Iraq, a region that was then, and for a long time after, majority Christian but which also lay near the heart of the Islamic Caliphate. Only twenty years before, the previous Caliph, al-Mahdī’s father, had founded Baghdad, intending it to be the great capital at the centre of the Islamic empire. It had since grown to an enormous size, soon eclipsing any city in Europe, its population over three times that of Constantinople or Rome. Among those who had newly settled in Baghdad was Timothy, who decided to similarly recentre the Patriarchate in the Caliphate’s capital. As such, Timothy was not an unusual sight at court. However, this day’s audience was something out of the usual.

Baghdad was home to more than five monasteries at this time. They served both Christians and Muslims as cool retreats and beauty spots within the bustling city.

Timothy entered the Caliph’s presence and made his courtesies and blessed him.

“Since you are wise,” the Caliph asked, “why do you say that God ‘begat’ a son?”

Over the next two days, al-Mahdī proceeded to ask him questions on the differences between Christianity and Islam: Do you believe in three Gods? Do you not believe that the Qur’an was given by God? Why do you not accept Muḥammad?

Yet, for a Christian in the early Islamic world, to respond to such questions was not without trepidation.

Generally, the Muslim state was not an active persecutor of Christians. Instead, Christians were expected to abide by certain social restrictions. These followed the precedent of a supposed agreement drawn up in the early seventh century between the second Caliph ‘Umar) and the majority Christian populations of the near east during the conquests of the region. Its historicity is doubted, but it came to have a great impact on the rights and responsibilities that Muslim authorities held to exist between themselves and their Christian subjects.

Accordingly, Christians were restricted in their behaviour and dress. They had to distinguish themselves by their clothing, such as wearing a distinctive belt called a zunnār, and they were forbidden from taking Muslim names. They were not allowed to build or restore churches, nor to encourage Muslims to convert, let them in their churches, carry out services in their hearing, or serve them wine. In this way Muslims and Christians would be kept visibly distinct, Christians would be socially subordinated, and Muslims prevented from being led astray, with conversion kept strictly one-way. In return, Muslim authorities would guarantee freedom of belief and extend the protection of the state to Christians. Such was the law in theory.

In the shade of the garden

On Easter day the Christians of Baghdad would come from throughout the city to the monastery of Samālū to take communion. With them too came many of Baghdad’s Muslims to join in the festivities that followed. In the cool shade of the monastery’s beautiful gardens and palm groves they drank wine, danced with young Christians and listened to the sounds of the services, the chanting of monks and priests. This was not an unusual occurrence. Baghdad was home to more than seven monasteries at this time. They served both Christians and Muslims as cool retreats and beauty spots within the bustling city, while their frequent feasts and festivals always attracted many Muslims.

A level of life otherwise invisible in the historical records, such revelries were a source of inspiration for many Muslim poets. Many of their longing verses on the joys of monastery gardens, the sound of Christian services, and the smells and tastes of wine, made their way into poetry collections, such as the tenth-century collection of monastery-themed poems and anecdotes compiled by the Iraqi Muslim al-Shābushtī. For these poets and the leisure class they represented, the transgressiveness of these themes was clearly part of the appeal, but in the background many ordinary Muslims too were freely attending Christian festivities and frequenting monasteries where they were overhearing services and rubbing shoulders with Christians.

While rules existed to stop this mixing they were evidently not enforced. Indeed, the Muslim polymath al-Jāḥiẓ, in his Reply to the Christians written in the mid-ninth century, decried this regular flouting of the rules. The Christians rode highly bred horses and played polo, he complained. They gave themselves Muslim names, failed to wear their zunnārs or hid them beneath their clothes, and draped themselves in fashionable silks. Throughout most of the Muslim ruled near east and Mediterranean, Christians daily rubbed shoulders with their Muslim neighbours, generally without mishap. Christians worked with Muslims and many had Muslim relatives, as individuals and family branches slowly converted. Still these mixed environments could be hazardous for Christians to navigate.

A party in Damascus

At a party in Damascus, a few years prior to Timothy’s audience with the Caliph, a young Christian named Elias mixed alongside Muslim and Christian guests. He had been hired to wait at the party by the Muslim host, the owner of the saddle shop at which Elias worked, and found himself subjected to the taunts and mockery of some of the Muslim guests because of his distinctive dress. As the night wore on they warmed to him and he was invited to join the dancing, for which he laid aside his zunnār. Come morning, however, he was informed by some of the Muslim partygoers that they took this as a sign of his conversion. Terrified of being accused of apostacy from Islam if he was seen continuing to practice Christianity in public, he approached the manager of his workshop, a recent Muslim convert, who assured him that none of this would be reported. Sometime after this, Elias’ family confronted the manager over unpaid wages, and he threatened to report Elias for apostacy. Elias fled back to his home village. However, a few years later he returned, again requesting his unpaid wages. Enraged, the manager reported him to the authorities. He was charged with apostasy and executed.

So relates the account of his martyrdom, written not long after his execution, when he was already being commemorated as a martyr. We can’t be sure on the details. It is possible for instance that the narrative of being tricked at a party covers a more consensual conversion. Yet, parties could be hazardous as well as fun settings. Muslims and Christians freely mixed but there was still an underlying imbalance in social status. We see this in the poetic verses on monastery parties where young Christians often seem to have had little recourse in fending off the advances of older guests. Christians also had to be cautious in how they responded to possible mockery and questioning. Still, many of those executed for apostasy in this period had converted perfectly willingly before later recanting. Conversion to Islam was, in theory, very easy, requiring only the declaration of the shahāda, the Islamic expression of faith, acknowledging that there was no God but God and that Muḥammad was the messenger of God. Once witnessed, leaving Islam was legally impossible. However, again, this was not something that the state was active in searching out. Elias’ story rings true. Had he stayed in the village, he would probably have been fine, but it was a personal workplace conflict that provided the catalyst for his denouncement, at which point the state was compelled to act.

The streets of Córdoba

One of the other great cities of the early Islamic world was Córdoba, which lay at the heart of the Islamic emirate at the other end of the Mediterranean. Like Baghdad it dwarfed all the other cities of Europe and was home to many Christians and Muslims. Here, in 850, a country priest, while on an errand in the city, was approached by Muslims who asked him what Christians believed about Jesus and Muḥammad. The priest, named Perfectus, freely confessed Christ to be God but he was reluctant to offer an opinion on Muḥammad. However, further assured that there would be no repercussions, he did not hold back. He declared Muḥammad to be a false prophet, an adulterer deceived by demons. Enraged, his questioners nevertheless kept their promise and let him go. When, however, he was next in the city, word of his statements seemed to have spread. A crowd seized him, and he was taken before the city’s judge and imprisoned. Several months later he was beheaded.

Perfectus’ death sparked a wave of deliberate blasphemy in the city. Over the next nine years, 33 Christians confronted the judge, stood in the city’s market forum, and even entered the grand mosque, denouncing Muḥammad and provoking the state to execute them. Their actions were immensely controversial among the local Christians. Actions of deliberate provocation intended to lead to martyrdom had been condemned by the early church, and many also saw them as imperilling the freedom they enjoyed from social restrictions. However, like al-Jāḥiẓ, it was a frustration with precisely this lack of distinction between Christians and Muslims that had at least partly inspired the martyrs, concerned that the distinction between Christianity and Islam would be lost too. Yet, there were also 11 individuals executed in these years who had not sought martyrdom. Executed for apostacy, some had converted to Islam and then changed their minds, or been supposedly tricked like Elias, others were the children of Muslim parents who had converted through the influence of a Christian relative. All came from mixed families, many the children of mixed marriages, and, unlike the blasphemers, all had been hunted down by the state after being denounced by relatives or neighbours.

In the early Islamic world, blasphemy and apostacy were the main reasons Christians found themselves facing execution. However, in this too the state was not proactive but acted mainly in response to denouncers, who were often motivated by personal grievances.

Back in Baghdad

Standing before the Caliph, Timothy was fully aware of the perils. In answering al-Mahdī’s questions he was walking a tightrope between blasphemy and conversion. If he responded too stridently in his answers he could find himself, like Perfectus, charged with blasphemy. At the same time though, the Caliph’s questions on the oneness of God and the status of Muḥammad drove at the key elements of the Islamic confession of faith. Al-Mahdī had apparently tried to persuade Timothy’s predecessor to convert during a similar audience, while Timothy’s opponent in the election for patriarch supposedly later converted to Islam under the Caliph’s influence. If Timothy answered too deferentially, he perhaps risked claims of inadvertent conversion, like Elias.

Asked why he believed God had begotten a son, he responded:

“O God-loving King, who has uttered such a blasphemy?”

"Do you not say that Christ is the Son of God?"

"O King, Christ is the Son of God, but not a son in the flesh, he is the word of God.”

He continued to answer the Caliph’s questions with much care and respect.

Did the Qur’an come from God?

“It is not my business to decide whether it is from God or not.”

“What do you say about Muḥammad?” This was the area of greatest sensitivity.

“Muḥammad is worthy of all praise by all reasonable people, O my Sovereign. He walked in the path of the prophets and trod in the track of the lovers of God. All the prophets taught the doctrine of one God, and since Muhammad taught the doctrine of the unity of God, he walked therefore in the path of the prophets. Because of this God honoured him and brought low before his feet two powerful kingdoms. Who will not praise, O our victorious King, the one whom God has praised? These and similar things I and all God-lovers utter about Muhammad, O my Sovereign.”

“You should, therefore accept the words of the Prophet.”

“Which words?”

“That God is one and that there is no other one besides Him.”

“I believe in one God, O my Sovereign, I have learned from the Torah, from the prophets and from the Gospel. I stand by it and shall die in it.”

“We children of men are in this perishable world as in darkness,” declared Timothy. “The pearl of the true faith fell in the midst of all of us, and it is in the hand of one of us, while we all believe we possess it. The signs wrought in the name of Jesus Christ are the bright rays and shining lustre of the precious pearl of faith.”

“We have hope in God that we are the possessors of this pearl,” declared the Caliph.

“Amen, O King,” Timothy replied, “but may God grant us that we may share it with you, and rejoice in the shining lustre of the pearl!”

“We pray,” he concluded, “that the King of Kings would preserve the throne of the Commander of the Faithful.”

Whether this interaction happened, or happened the way Timothy reported it in his letter cannot be known. Certainly he had regular audiences with al-Mahdī and his successors. Earlier in the year he had appeared several times before the Caliph on the matter of restoring various churches along the western border. In Baghdad he was also known as a willing opponent for debate and a well-regarded expert on Aristotle, at a court in which people still regularly engaged in such interreligious debates. But either way, his reason for circulating this letter was clearly instructional, showing others how to avoid the hazards implicit in everyday encounters and conversations. It offered a vision of how to navigate safely between the twin dangers of apostacy and blasphemy, neither compromising Christian beliefs nor recklessly offending Muslim beliefs. While circulated primarily among the leading bishops and schools of the region, these were the individuals and institutions tasked with training priests, monks and teachers, who, like Perfectus, might find themselves the most frequently on the end of similar questions, while they further offered instruction to laity. Originally written in Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic primarily used by Christians, it was soon translated into Arabic and in this form remained popular in the region into the modern-era.

Yet, still, Timothy felt keenly his own weakness and the imperfection of his answers, his inability to explain or persuade.

“I feel repugnance,” wrote Timothy in his introduction to the letter, “on account of the futility of the outcome of the work. But love covers and hides all these weaknesses as the water covers and hides the rocks that are under it.”

Further reading

Full translation of Timothy’s Dialogue with the Caliph al-Mahdī, translated by Alphonse Mingana (1928): Link.

Sahner, Christian C., Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press, 2018).

Article

Coptic Church

Creed

Egypt

Identity

Middle East

20 January 2024

11 min read

God in the garbage: Egypt's unlikely megachurch

Cairo's Church of the Zabballeen is the largest Church, and one of the most unusual in the Middle East. Graham Tomlin tells its story and that of the remarkable priest who inspired it.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

a view from the bottom of a huge cave to the sky, up row upon row of seating tiers.

To drive through Iz-Zurrayyeb, a poor area on the outskirts of Cairo is to enter a maelstrom of noise, garbage, dust and dirt. At first glance, it looks a grim place to live. There is rubbish everywhere. Cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, wood, rags, tins. Much of the refuse of the city of Cairo – about 3000 tons every day - ends up here.

Yet the most surprising thing is what you find when you reach the heart of this community, one of the poorest in Egypt – an enormous 20,000 seater Church, the largest church in the Middle East – built into a cave in a sheer rock face.

The story of this community goes back to the 1940s, when groups of Coptic Christian rural dwellers from Upper Egypt started migrating to the city of Cairo when life on their land became more and more difficult. These immigrants initially continued pig-farming, buying the city’s waste to feed their pigs, until they found a more lucrative way to live: by collecting the waste of the city’s residents, sorting it carefully and salvaging things of value to be sold. Feeding waste to their pigs and processing the pork to sell to the Christian population of Cairo also brought in some much-needed income.

Around 1970, some of the Zabballeen (or ‘garbage collectors’) as they were called, were evicted from the parts of Cairo where they were scattered, and moved together to an abandoned quarry on the outskirts of the city. As a result, they settled in Iz-Zurrayyeb, under the cliffs of Mokattam mountain and started establishing what is sometimes called Garbage City. They built a shanty-town there, with rudimentary dwellings, keeping pigs and eking out a living recycling refuse.

The Zabballeen recycle about 80% of the waste they collect, an astonishing result when you consider most western cities which struggle to reach 25%. It is a remarkably efficient system. At night the men (mostly) go out into the city streets, collecting as much garbage as they can. Each family co-operative has a particular area of the city where they are entitled to collect waste.

There is some competition to get the wealthier areas – as is true anywhere in the world, rich people’s garbage offers better pickings than those of the poorer areas. Rather than being paid to collect the waste, the Zabballeen pay a fee to the Wahiya, a group of Muslim migrants to Cairo who arrived before the Christian Zabballeen, and who own the rights to much of city’s the garbage.

They then take it back to their neighbourhood, packed tightly into large parcels, tied together with rope, precariously perched on the top of motorised bikes, carts or lorries. The rubbish is then deposited in the front entrance yard of the house, and sorted, usually by the women and young girls.

The sorting is fiercely well-organised. Cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, food waste are all separated. The food waste is fed to the pigs (the Zabballeen, being almost entirely Christians, are happy to keep pigs, unlike their Muslim neighbours). Cans and bottles are packed tightly together by locally made crushing machines into neat, easily transported bales to be sold to firms that can reuse the material. Rags and paper are put aside for reuse in local craft production. Some within the community reprocess waste and produce sellable items themselves - especially in the plastics recycling business - running big recycling units, producing coat hangers, plastic bags and other goods.

Iz-Zurrayyeb street scenes

A child walks between bags of rubbish in a pile

A motor-trike passes a green wall and stairs.

A suspended basket hangs above a narrow, rubbish strewn street.

You would have thought the government might have been delighted at a system of waste disposal with these spectacular recycling results. Yet the city authorities seem to make life hard for the Zabballeen at every point. They used to carry the rubbish back to the neighbourhood by donkey and cart, but the authorities thought these were unsightly, didn’t project a modern image of the city and left donkey poo on the streets, so in the late 1980s, banned them.

The Zabballeen were compelled to sell what land they still owned, or take out loans to small lorries and motorised trucks to ferry the waste instead. The problem is that the streets of Garbage City, running between the high blocks of flats that the residents live in, are too narrow. They were built for donkeys and carts, and so at rush hour, the place becomes like a parking lot, a nightmare of honking horns, vehicles inching slowly past each other with millimetres to spare on either side.

Then there was swine flu. When the pandemic hit the world in 2009, despite the fact that no pig in Egypt ever caught the disease, the government ordered every pig in the country to be slaughtered. This was a disaster for the Zabballeen. Their whole carefully crafted system for dealing with garbage depended on pigs eating the food waste. They could no longer bring the waste back to the city as the rotting food would make the place unbearable. As a result, rubbish began to pile up in the streets of Cairo until the Zabballeen were able to restore their stock of pigs and start again.

The Zabballeen’s way of life is threatened even now. In 2003, the Egyptian government entered into multi-million dollar contracts with international companies to collect Cairo’s waste, presumably because they would do it in a tidier and less obtrusive way, despite the fact that these companies are only required to recycle 20% of the waste - the remaining 80% gets dumped into landfills. Many Cairo residents still prefer the old system run by the Zabballeen, as the new companies charge them more, and fail to offer the personalised door-to-door collection that the Zabballeen did.

Public piety - posters of priests and a pope

A motor-trike passes along a narrow street past a poster of a priest and a pope.

A street seller stands at a booth below a poster of a priest.

A woman walks through a narrow crowded street.

In the 1960s, alcoholism, violence and drug use were rife in Iz-Zurrayyeb, as in many areas of extreme poverty across the world. Yet in the early 1970s, something began to stir.

Ferahat Ibrahim was a young Christian printer living in Cairo, a passionate evangelist, part of an independent Coptic group that ministered among the poor of Egypt. He got to know Qidees, the man who collected rubbish in the neighbourhood where he lived, and spoke to him about faith in Jesus Christ. Qidees urged him to come to speak to his family and friends in the community at Mokattam mountain.

Reluctantly, Ferahat agreed to do so. One day, while praying there, a storm blew up, and from among the mass of paper swirling in the wind, a single leaf torn from a book drifted from one of the piles of rubbish to land at his feet. It was a page from the Bible in Arabic – Acts chapter 18, to be exact. Picking it up, he read some words originally addressed by God to St Paul: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.”

Taking this as a divine calling, he began to go from house to house, preaching a simple message that God loved everyone without exception - including garbage collectors, the possibility of a new beginning and a call for people to repent, to change their ways in response to the love of God revealed in Jesus. Although he was not ordained, Ferahat never questioned the Coptic Orthodox baptism of these Christians, though recognised that in many cases their faith was no more than nominal and needed reviving. He would pray for people’s healing, or where he suspected something darker at work, would engage in the exorcism of evil spirits. Gradually, more and more people began to meet, looking for places to gather.

Being Coptic Orthodox by origin, as the church grew, they decided they wanted a priest, but not just any priest. They wanted Ferahat. So in 1978, with the support of the Coptic Pope Shenouda, he became Abuna Sima’an - an ordained priest of the Orthodox Church. He also began to recruit others from within the community as fellow workers in this fast-growing church. He remained ministering among the Zabballeen until he died just last year, in October 2023. 40,000 people turned up for his funeral.

Gradually, more and more people joined the fledgling church. Over time the whole neighbourhood changed. As drug and alcohol use diminished, money was freed up to be spent on healthcare and strengthening family life, education and a thriving children's centre. One of the first buildings that went up was a new Church to meet in. Inspired by the sight of a proper solid building among their flimsy dwellings, shacks and tents were replaced with brick-built apartment blocks that enabled the sorting to happen on the ground floor while families lived in cleaner apartments above.

The community persuaded the government to connect water, electricity and sewage facilities. Fr Sima’an’s wife Souad Hanna started a school that has in time become a launchpad for further teachers in the area. A centre began to provide for people with disabilities, rather than leaving them begging on the streets.

Sorting rubbish with no gloves leads to regular bouts of tetanus, and rates of sickness in the city are high. Nothing if not inventive, they built their own hospital. Pooling money raised from their work, and with the aid of a Finnish foundation, they built a state-of-the-art facility. Unlike the streets of the neighbourhood, the hospital is clean, modern, efficient and is as good as hospitals you’d find in any modern city.

The rocky area in which they live contains a number of caves. As the church building became too small, some of these began to be used as meeting places for worship. One cave filled with large rocks was painstakingly cleared, and hollowed out further by the residents to provide a 5000 seat auditorium for public worship. As more and more people came to church, even this was just not big enough, so they started to work on proper seating in another cave. This one now has seating for 20,000 people. It is the largest church building in the middle east.

Unlike most megachurches of this size, it is not Pentecostal but Coptic. The ancient Coptic church in Egypt, which claims its origin in St Mark’s visit to Egypt to preach the gospel after the Resurrection of Jesus, went through a revival in the 1960s which still carries on today. Monasteries which had been reduced to a few old monks living an austere life in ramshackle monastic houses, much like many such communities in the west today, suddenly found young men applying to be members of these ancient communities, many of which go back to the fourth century.

The walls of the Zabballeen cave churches have lovingly sculpted reliefs of biblical stories, usually relating to the need for repentance, or Jesus’ miracles relating to the poor – healing blind men, the paralysed or the woman whose period would never stop.

The streets of the neighbourhood are festooned with posters of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Coptic Pope Tawadros, and Abuna Sima’an (the unlikely equivalent is an English low-income area festooned with pictures of the local vicar!). The Coptic community in Egypt has been through troubled times. In the mid-2010s, a wave of bombings by Islamic fundamentalist groups killed and injured many Christians. 5% of the population of Egypt are Christian, yet the Zabballeen wear their faith on their sleeves. Their Christianity is not hidden. It is out on display. Presumably because it makes the difference between hope and despair.

The cave churches

A screen dominates the centre of a church in a cave with amphitheatre seating.

A church amphitheatre within a cave with a carved cross on a supporting pillar.

A bible scene is carved into the wall of a cave, below which is seating.

a cliff with carved and painted Christian scenes.

In an election year in the UK, political parties will offer their solutions for urban regeneration, and how to address areas where levels of crime, alcohol and drug abuse and the related mental health issues are rife. The story of the Zabballeen doesn't provide easy answers but it does suggest that there is a deeply spiritual dimension to these problems and that a revival of the faith that western culture has gradually been shedding for the last few hundred years might actually be a key to community transformation.

When people have a bigger reason to live, something deeper than just getting richer, something that gives them a purpose for building family life, investing in healthcare, education and the things that build good community, then things begin to change. Deep transformation of this kind needs a transcendent purpose, not just social programmes dreamed up by politicians.

We hear much these days about the demise of the church in the Middle East. And much of that is true – in many places, the Christian church has been harried down to much smaller numbers through the pressure of intimidation and the possibility of emigration. Yet that’s not the whole story. Here is a church thriving in the most poverty-stricken and unlikely of circumstances.

In the west we tend to think of Christianity as a western religion and one for the respectable and relatively well-off. The story of the Zabballeen tells a very different story, one that is much more representative of the church across the world. Dynamic Christianity thrives not in places where people have everything they need, but in places where they know they need help. Here is Christianity in the raw, thriving among people who have few possessions and who seem to be, in language that St Paul used to describe himself ‘the scum of the earth’.

Their story is a powerful reminder of the ingenuity of locally based initiatives rather than corporate imposed solutions. It also says something about the transforming power of Christianity in places of great poverty and need. Walk around areas of desperate poverty in western cities and you often find people beaten down by life. Despair hangs in the air when a community struggles with problems of debt, alcohol and drug abuse.

There is very little of that on Mokattam mountain. There is an energy, vibrancy and purpose about the place, despite the grim living conditions. A friend who lived for a number of years in Garbage City tells me he loved living there because of the warmth of the friendships and the spirit of the place. That may be partly due to the sheer industry and ingenuity of these people, but not just that. It seems to rise up from a faith that gives hope and purpose in a place where you’d least expect to find it.