THE FIRES of NAXČAWAN in Search of Intercultural Transmission in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, and Syriac

THE FIRES OF NAXČAWAN In Search of Intercultural Transmission in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, and Syriac Introduction Near the turn of the eighth century, Armenian nobles rebelled against Arab rule and turned to Byzantium to secure their independence. Muḥammad b. Marwān, the brother of the caliph ῾Abd al-Malik, responded and defeated the Greek forces in order to reclaim Armenia as a caliphal province. He told the Armenian nobles that he wanted to increase their stipends and under this pretext he gathered them in the churches of the province Vaspurakan in southern Armenia. He then ordered his forces to burn the churches down, immolating the Armenians as punishment for their rebellion. This event, “the year of the fire” as Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ calls it, rever- berated through the Near East and today we have accounts of the fires in Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, and Greek, dating as early as the eighth century. These accounts exhibit substantial differences, though: the reigning caliph is either ῾Abd al-Malik or al-Walīd; the date is 696, 703, 704, or 705; the churches are in Xram or Khilāṭ/Xlat‘ and/or al-Nashawā/Naxčawan (modern: Naxçıvan); the victims are the Armenian nobles or maybe just their troops; and the names of the instigators and captives change, although Muḥammad b. Marwān remains as a constant thread. This article joins the search for intercultural transmission between the various literatures of the Near East by untangling the discrepancies between the different accounts about the fires in Naxčawan. The goal is not to determine which account best describes “what really happened,” though there are some details that we might forward as possibilities; instead, this article places each version into its proper context and ques- tions what we mean by reliability in texts about the Umayyad period. It first introduces the three main sets of traditions: Armenian sources, non- Armenian Christian sources, and Muslim Arabic sources. Subsequently, it identifies the main discrepancies between the various versions, such as the date, caliph, place, victims, and captives. Finally, it presents the context of two different renditions in order to speculate on the use and value of this particular event in the Arabic and Armenian historiographical traditions and thereby to explain some of the more notable discrepancies. Le Muséon 129 (3-4), 323-362. doi: 10.2143/MUS.129.3.3180783 - Tous droits réservés. © Le Muséon, 2016. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_04_Vacca.indd 323 29/11/16 06:05 324 A. vacca 1. A Brief Note on Scholarly Context With the publication of M. Cook and P. Crone’s Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World in 1977, historians of Islam met the zenith of the skeptic movement that was born from transferring the methods of Biblical criticism into the context of Near Eastern history1. In the decades since, scholars are still responding to the charges of the skeptics by examining deficiencies of the Arabic sources, struggling to justify their continued use. Hagarism is a wonderfully provocative book; it is the great “what if…?” of early Islamic historiography2. In rejecting the traditional Arabic accounts for early Islamic history, Cook and Crone venture into fraught territory. First, this approach assumes that Arabic traditions are wholly other, independent of the historical sources in other Near Eastern lan- guages. Second, it rejects one set of flawed sources for another several sets of flawed sources, putting the onus on the modern historian to reveal and mediate the problems inherent in a number of diverse Christian and Jewish texts. None of our sources, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, are inherently impartial or flawless. Since the publication of Hagarism, numerous scholars have explored the relationship between Muslim and Christian historical writing, fore- most among whom we find L. Conrad and R. Hoyland. Hoyland published his Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam in 2007 and Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowl- edge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam in 20113. Hoyland logically advo- cates for a “promiscuity of approach” in writing Islamic history due to the shared experience and similar circumstances of the disparate groups in the Near East. He supported this with the argument that “no one tradi- tion was insulated from the influence of others”4. At the same time, he is quick to clarify that ties between different literary traditions cannot always be explained by direct textual transmission: “I am not denying that there was influence and borrowing, but rather doubting that enough ground- work has been done as yet to allow determination of its nature”5. Hoyland continues to contribute significantly to this discussion, and his subsequent 1 COOK – CRONE, Hagarism. On the relationship between the skeptic movement and Biblical criticism, see WANSBROUGH, The Sectarian Milieu; DONNER, Narratives, p. 35- 63. 2 HUMPHREYS, Islamic History, p. 81. 3 See also HOYLANd, Historiography. 4 HOYLANd, Seeing Islam, p. 32. 5 HOYLANd, Seeing Islam, p. 34, n. 8. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_04_Vacca.indd 324 29/11/16 06:05 THE FIRES OF NAXČAWAN 325 work on Theophilus of Edessa suggests that “a lot more historical mate- rial was circulating between the Muslim and Christian communities than is usually assumed”6. There have been several other recent studies that have honed in on the question of intercultural transmission, notably those of A. Borrut, M. Conterno, and L. Conrad7. In particular, though, this study is inspired by L. Conrad’s insightful case-study on the Arab conquest of Arwād8. In studying closely the texts concerning the Arab conquest of this small Mediterranean island off the coast of Syria, Conrad is able to demonstrate that the accounts in Arabic must be read with a broader eye to their place- ment in the works of history. He successfully demonstrates the confusion between Arwād, Cyprus, and Crete in Arabic texts. However, Conrad’s conclusion, namely that it is impossible to obtain much information about the Arab conquests based on the futūḥ genre in Arabic, is hopefully one that future scholarship will continue to challenge. While Conrad’s case about Arwād is convincing, the only way we can verify his conclusion is to repeat comparable case studies to see if these corroborate his findings. This article attempts just that, while also adding an extra layer: historical texts composed in Armenian. Some historians of Armenia share Conrad’s conclusion about the reliability of Arabic sources on the seventh century. In their historical com- mentary to the translation of Sebēos, R. Thomson, J. Howard-Johnston, and T. Greenwood note that …the latter-day historian should not expect more than a highly distorted view of both the general and the particular in Arab accounts of the conquests… The historian determined to try to grasp something of what happened to change the late antique world out of all recognition in the seventh century cannot start from the Islamic sources any more than from the Syrian and Byzantine. A start has to be made elsewhere, in the fourth of the Near East’s historical traditions, that of Armenia9. Presumably the authors here intend to offer Sebēos as an alternative to the troublesome futūḥ narratives. The problem, of course, is that we cannot assume that the Armenian sources are independent from the Arabic, Greek, or Syriac, let alone that they are a single undifferentiated group or that they tend to be more correct. 6 HOYLANd, Theophilus of Edessa, p. 29. 7 BORRUT, Entre mémoire et pouvoir; BORRUT, La circulation; CONTERNO, La ‘Descri- zione dei tempi’; CONRAd, The mawālī; CONRAd, Theophanes; CONRAd, Arabic Chronicle. 8 CONRAd, The Conquest of Arwād. 9 THOMSON et al., Sebeos, vol. 2, p. 237. 99279_Museon_2016_3-4_04_Vacca.indd 325 29/11/16 06:05 326 A. vacca T. Greenwood engaged with exactly this question when he published his extensive “Reassessment of the History of Łewond” (2012)10, an updated study of the source that preserves one of the most significant accounts of the fires in Naxčawan. One of his main arguments is that we cannot read Armenian sources as independent from broader trends in Near Eastern historiography: Although its Armenian character and language gives the text an exotic fla- vour for modern scholars, and hence an impression of otherness, an opposite contention shall be advanced, that Łewond’s History was influenced by both Armenian and non-Armenian historical traditions and that far from being conceived and written in historiographical isolation, it should be seen as an expression of cross-cultural engagement and acculturation in early medieval Armenia11. Given these significant advances in Islamic and Near Eastern historiography, this article offers Muḥammad b. Marwān’s fires as a case study, like Conrad’s exposition of the Arab conquest of Arwād, to examine the independence, coherence, and reliability of Near Eastern sources. 2. The Corpus There are three main sets of traditions about the fires in Naxčawan: the Armenian sources, the non-Armenian Christian sources, and the Muslim Arabic sources. 2.1. The Set of Armenian Sources The longest and most specific accounts of the fires at Naxčawan and Xram are in Armenian. Specifically, the oldest known account of the event, should we trust the traditional late eighth-century date, is Łewond’s Patmabanut‘iwn, or History, which has confusingly attained the modern title Aršawank‘ Arabac‘ i Hays, or Arab Incursions into Armenia12. A priest, Łewond wrote his history of the Caliphate from 632 to 788 in Armenian at the behest of a Bagratid sponsor. In his Patmabanut‘iwn, Łewond describes how the Armenians and Byz- antines joined forces against the Arabs and faced an army with Muḥammad b. Marwān at its head.

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