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).

Essay

Belief

Creed

11 May 2023

8 min read

Questioning the question

Seemingly rational questions can suck the oxygen from the room. Andrew Steane was in such a room when it happened.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

A modern staging of King Lear has the cast across the page. King Lear is front of stage gesturing while the others look on

A 2012 production of King Lear at Hamburg State Opera.

rinkhoff-Moegenburg, professional photographers from Lüneburg, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We all know that asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is at the heart of most intellectual activity. Questions must be encouraged. We know this. But are there any questions which may not be asked? Questions which should not be asked?

Many a young adult might instinctively say “no: never! All questions must be encouraged!” but when invited to think it through, they will come to realise that there is a little more to it than that. There are, for example, statements which present themselves in all the innocent garb of questions, but which smuggle in nasty and false assertions, such as the phrase “why are blond people intellectually inferior to dark people?” There are questions which mould the questioner, such as “will I feel better if I arrange for this other person to be silenced?”

Questions can serve horrible purposes: they can focus the mind down a channel of horror, such as, “what is the quickest way to bulldoze this village?” Even more extreme examples could be given. They make it clear that not all statements that appear to be questions are primarily questions at all, and not all questions are innocent.

Every question is a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral.

On reflection, then, it becomes clear that every question you can ask, just like every other type of utterance you can make, is not a simple self-contained thing. Every question is a connector to all sorts of related assumptions and projects, some of them far from morally neutral. This makes it not just possible, but sometimes important and a matter of ethics and duty, not just to refuse to answer, but to raise an objection to the question itself. More precisely, one objects to the assumptions that lie behind the question, and which have rendered the question objectionable.

“Have you stopped beating your children?”

“Tell me, my daughters … which of you shall we say doth love us most?”

“How do you reconcile your rationality with your religious faith?”

In all three cases the question is itself faulty. It is at fault because it has brought in an unjustified and untrue assumption. Such questions have no answer except to object to such assumptions and try to help the questioner see the situation more truthfully.

In the first case, if the question is pressed, and I am hauled up before the judge in a court of law, then I will protest, with a clear conscience and as forcefully as I can, that I never did beat my children in the first place and therefore the question is itself at fault. (Such a question is like the unethical practice called “leading the witness” which a good judge will rule out of order in a court of law.)

The second example is the question asked by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play. The play revolves around the fact that Lear has misunderstood the very nature of love. The one who loves him best will not, and cannot, reply in the way he anticipates. His daughter Cordelia chooses largely silence, and to show her love by her behaviour.

The third question is the one that prompted this article. I have been asked it, either explicitly or implicitly, many times. Every time I have been aware that the very atmosphere of the question has prejudged the issue. It is like being asked whether you have stopped beating your children.

To be fair, it is not as bad as the children example, but I use the comparison to help the reader get some sense of the issue. In the case of faith and reason, for any reasonable person, no reconciliation is required because their faith was never divorced from their rationality in the first place. Rather, the two have walked along together, each moulding the other from the start. Being asked to explain this is like being asked to explain that you are honest.

This is not to say that a dishonest or confused person might well have cognitive dissonances - muddles and inconsistences between what they tried to trust and what they had sufficient reason to believe. So, they would have some intellectual and spiritual work to do. And none of us is perfectly honest and clear-headed so we all have some learning to do. But most of us are not starting out from a place of complete dishonesty or contradiction. In particular, our scientific understandings and religious commitments are not pulling in different directions, as the dubious question seems to assume they are. Rather, the deeper our understanding of each, the deeper our appreciation of their roles as two aspects of a single dance becomes.

I recall clearly a discussion with a friend by the side of a football field where our children were playing in a match. The subject turned to religious matters and, with a view to briefly describing his position, my friend said he based his conclusions on reason, and then gestured to some vague idea that I had something else called faith. The obvious implication was that his conclusions had a basis in reason and mine did not. This was not argued or demonstrated; it was the very starting-point of the way he thought the conversation should operate. This floored me. What could I say? It was like being told you are a sub-species, some sort of childish person who does not appreciate reason and therefore should shut up while the adults are talking. (It was also a bit like an amateur wrestler thinking he could advise Muhammad Ali on how to box).

What about the questions which betray assumptions which are themselves questionable, but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes?

Now we have arrived at the point of this article, which is not, I will admit, the general issue of questioning the question, but the specific issue of religion and rationality. I want to focus attention on where the issue of questioning the question really lies. The issue is not, “are there questions which are objectionable?” (we already settled that). Nor is it, “let’s have some intellectual amusement unpicking what is objectionable about some ill-posed question which we find it easy to tell is ill-posed.” No, the heart of this issue is: what about the questions which betray assumptions which are themselves questionable, but which we don’t recognise as such, because of the assumptions of our culture and the intellectual habits it promotes?

For example, where do you start in response to a question such as “how do you reconcile science and religion?”

I think you start by pointing out that if one has a healthy version of both then they are not estranged in the first place.

In order to show this, the discussion has to unpack the difference between a valid and invalid grasp of the nature of scientific explanation, and the difference between healthy and unhealthy religion. It will also include some effort to clarify what a person means by the term ‘religion’. The discussion may include some consideration of the history of science, and the lived experience of a research scientist. It should also bring in the brave efforts of reformers down the ages to realise fairer forms of human society.

In the room when it happens

But in order for this discussion to get going, there has to be some oxygen in the room. I have been in rooms where the question, “how do you reconcile science and religion?” has made me feel every bit as queasy as the “beating your children” one. The hollow feeling of having been pigeonholed before you can open your mouth. The feeling of being in the presence of people whose mental landscape does not even allow the garden where you live. The feeling of being treated like a mental underling - it is all there. My reaction is strong because rationality is a deeply ingrained part of my very identity. It is every bit as important to me as it is to the self-declared ‘rationalists’, so that to face a presumption of guilt in this area is to face a considerable injustice.

On the other hand, religion is a broad phenomenon, having bad (terrible, horrendous) parts and good (wonderful, beautiful) parts, so the question might be a muddled attempt to ask, “what type of religion is going on in you?” It still remains a suspicious question, like “are you honest?” but in view of the nastiness of bad religion, perhaps we have to live with it. Perhaps we should allow that people will need to ask, to get some reassurance, and to help them on their own journey. But we can only make a reply if the questioner does not come over like an inquisitor who has already made up their mind. The question needs to be, in effect, “I realise that we are both rational; would you unpack for me the way that rationality pans out for you?”

We all go forward in our lives with some sort of reliance on the ultimate well-spring of reality, whatever that is. We can’t do anything else.

Faith, in its healthy forms, is a kind of willingness. It is a willingness based on a combination of suggestive evidence, value, and lived experience. We all go forward in our lives with some sort of reliance on the ultimate well-spring of reality, whatever that is. We can’t do anything else. The faith which is called religious may include willingness to acknowledge this ultimate well-spring of reality in personal terms. We may express gratitude, for example, and objection, and we may ask for forgiveness or renewed hope. We thus behave in ways which cannot be addressed to a machine or a mere set of principles, worthy though those principles might be. When discussing science and religion we need the questioner at least to be open to the idea that this willingness can be a thoroughly rational willingness. It can be as subtle and deep as great poetry, not just shallow and thoughtless like greetings-card doggerel. Its relation to reason can be compared to the attitude we adopt when we recognize other humans as agents with aspirations and their own concerns. That is, it is in tune with reason, not unreason, but it is larger than reason. It is larger in the sense of richer, engaging more not less of us, as the arrival of the Nimrod movement in Elgar’s Enigma Variations is larger than a single melody.

This article is a re-write based on one originally written in 2014 for the OUP blog.